

Google, Bing, and SERP Copying: Additional Evidence? - hung
http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2011/04/06/google-bing-and-serp-copying-additional-evidence/

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jerf
"Otherwise they have a very similar method of cloaking detection, a similar
policy for punishment, and a similar timeline for reducing the punishment for
cloaking… At this point I feel that there are too many coincidences for this
to be mere chance."

I disagree. The realities of having to work in the real world will tend to
push Google and Bing in the same directions, even if their development is
fully independent. The possibility of independent implementations of similar
policies is _not_ so unlikely that it justifies accusations of copying. I
think you need more evidence.

Besides, it can't flow along the pathways that were previously established to
my satisfaction (YMMV). If I understand it correctly, the Bing toolbar
analyzes click patterns to see how pages connect together on the web, Google
used the Bing toolbar while making their spiked searches, and found that small
amounts of that signal made it into Bing, which was exposed when they created
searches by design that had no other signal. I'd lay money the Bing toolbar
now has an exclusion for Google (and probably other search sites), if only
because Google demonstrated it opens an attack vector from the competition.
And I do not think the Bing toolbar could pick up on cloaking like this,
because that would rest solely on Google's internal servers. I'm not even sure
by what mechanism Bing _could_ be copying this signal from Google.

~~~
kenjackson
Agree with jerf. And furthermore, looking at the chart provided its not clear
to me that one is trailing the other. For example, Bing has a big dip on March
14th, which is prior to the date that Google does. And even before the March
15th date your incoming data isn't very flat. And during the March 7th week
Bing seems to again lead Google on a downward trend.

I don't think you can assume anything from this data at all.

What would be far more useful, to prove this hypothesis, is request to Google
to not show the site for a week and see if Bing's results fall off a cliff. I
suspect they won't, but give it a shot.

~~~
kenjackson
And one more thing... Google seemed to suggest that the data took months to go
from Bing toolbar to search results. You seem to suggest it takes one day!
That's a pretty big difference in the efficiency of mining their clickstream
data.

~~~
hung
This is a good point. I am not sure how long it takes for change to propagate,
but you are right; one day seems pretty fast.

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blauwbilgorgel
Redirecting on user agent to a mobile site is kinda annoying, but not against
Google TOS. Only if you show Googlebot different content than you would show
other user agents (single out Googlebot), is it considered cloaking.

You talk of a penalty, where a search engine accessibility issue seems a lot
more likely. SE accessibility issues usually translate to all search engines.

Besides that there are a few other possibilities that follow Occam's razor and
don't promote the Bing-steals idea. The biggest of these would be trends or
market changes. If all around the board you get less people searching for your
product (for whatever reason), this should reflect in all search engines'
stats.

It's also perfectly possible that an older niche player cleaned up his/her
game, or a new competitor hit the scene. Both could eat up your traffic.

Or a webmaster that had many sites linking to you forgot to renew his/her
domains.

I don't fault the OP for jumping to conclusions (well, maybe a little bit more
care would be appreciated); search engines are a black box, and it is all too
easy to connect changes you made on the site, to changes in stats. Even when
they are not correlated.

Next time when you encounter a bump and ask yourself: Did I get a penalty?
Really try to pinpoint the problem: Which parts of the site took a drop? Does
that site still link to me? Is is a trend, and do last year's stats show the
same decline? etc. etc.

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-
pena...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty) can
help you with this. Also read up on how to submit a mobile sitemap and have
these sites running next to each other without any (perceived) problems:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648&hl=en)

~~~
hung
Thanks for your comment! I actually forgot to show the same mobile content to
Googlebot-mobile, so I think that's why they assumed it was cloaking.

My site gets pretty consistent traffic. It goes up and down depending on the
day of the week and the season but otherwise it's very normal. I am fairly
certain that the drop (and now the recovery) has to do with the mobile user
agent change I made. The results are now recovering to pre-dip levels, so I
don't think it could be something else.

The comments on this post are really illuminating. Thanks for sharing. This is
why I really love HN.

