Earlier this month, people were blown away when the news hit that the Federal Trade Commission will be investigating Google for allegedly replacing competitor links in search results with their partner’s website link instead.

Not only is this most certainly a practice that Google is doing, but recently Bing and Yahoo have been caught doing the same thing. To understand the severity of this,you have to get a glimpse into the numbers really quickly.

Take a search like “Music Videos” that gets about 10,000 searches per day. Yahoo Music is a partner with Bing through their alliance. Bing sees a competitor on the rise for music videos, and then comes the dirty replacement.

Bing has replaced competitor websites with websites that are partner’s in some way, shape, or form. Since Yahoo is so reliant on Bing’s search results, it’s really double-trouble here as Bing is now pulling strings on not one but two major search engines.

Has everybody forgotten about net neutrality here? It looks like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all willing to make borderline decisions to influence the rankings of websites in search engines for a profit, but isn’t this crap illegal and wrong?

This entry was posted on August 15, 2011 at 6:59 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Bing Search Engine Optimization by bing seo No Comments Yet