It seems as though changes and developments are happening all the time within the SEO world, and this is yet another to add to the list.
Following a recent announcement and deal, AOL sites will soon use Bing as their default search engine – this looks to be phased in over the next decade. In a further blow to Google, it also looks as though AOL will deal with the advertising of Microsoft. There have many reasons banded about as to why this decision has been reached by AOL. What appears to be clear is the apparent endorsement and confidence of the Bing search and Bing advertising platforms. At the time of writing, Google appears not to have offered any explanation or statement for the loss of this partnership. It seems the decision is based on ‘service’ reasons, but money, terms, or anything else could also be involved.
This story gives further sadness for Google, as something similar happened at the end of 2014 where Google lost out to Yahoo search engine for the Mozilla Firefox browser. As a result of this 2014 incident, Google’s share in the search market dropped heavily, so one can only guess (but safely predict?) what the repercussions of this latest announcement will be.
This is not the first piece of news where Google has been criticised by others. You may remember our earlier article which drew attention to the fact that paid news sites were treated differently to other paid platforms, and the amount of dissatisfaction that was evident.
Possibly the upshot of all this is Google needs to start taking account more of: the market, its users and their level of approval. If contracts are being lost and people are complaining, something is going wrong. Google’s best course of action would be to address this.
To find out more about how Google affects SEO, visit our SEO services page.