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Is Bing placing search ads in organic results going to add to their revenue or disrupt Google?
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2 Answers
Bing hasn't officially rolled this out yet as they are in testing mode, but I'm somewhat shocked that Bing would even consider testing this. The organic results are somewhat sacred in that they can't be bought (technically). Now, companies can put a lot of time/money/effort into achieving organic rankings, so you're essentially buying that placement in a roundabout way, but actually placing paid advertisements in the organic results just seems wrong, in my opinion. This is going back to the days of paid inclusion, which hasn't seen the light of day for over 2 years (Yahoo shut this down back in 2009).
If Bing does roll this out I do think it will increase their revenue as your average user won't know it's a paid ad. Most people today now know that the paid ads are either at the top, bottom or along the right side of the SERPs. If you throw them in with the organic results, they will get clicked. What will be interesting is to see the bounce rates on these clicks. It might be a whole lot of wasted money.
It's no different that Google placing 3 adwords results at the top with sitelinks that pushes down the organic results, atleast the Bing test doesn't push down the top 5-6 results so it's a much better option for business who works to compete organically.
So what is the lesser of two evils when it comes to they are commercial operations set out to make money... one that pushes down organic results with paid ads or one that ads paid ads just above the fold?
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