For those of you who follow the blog and our site and who are in web development or marketing, we thought we’d share our experience building this site for the past two months, particularly our conclusion that Bing has clearly set itself out as a superior search engine to Google. Here’s why.
We launched HomeBuyerTaxCredit.com in mid-January as what we still believe is the best Home Buyer Tax Credit resource available anywhere in the country. If you go to the national franchise sites, you’ll find information that is out of date or inaccurate. For example, we just checked out a particular “yellow” company’s website, one that has been advertising extensively online to attract tax credit buyers, and found that they’re still saying that the $6,500 credit is “for qualified buyers who currently own a home.” That simply not correct. To claim the $6,500 credit, you do NOT have to currently own a home, you just have to be someone who owned one for five consecutive years out of the last eight. That’s not a small mistake, particularly since the purpose of the “5 year out of 8″ requirement was specifically to allow people who do NOT own right now to get the long-time homeowner credit (i.e., people forced to sell because of the economy). And it’s not a typo, since the misinformation continues in the bullet points, when the yellow company says “Current homeowners are eligible for a $6,500 tax credit, provided you have lived in the home you are selling as a principal residence for five consecutive years within the last eight years.”
That stuff drives us nuts, a national company making two significant mistakes about the tax credit in the span of about one page of material, particularly since it’s clear from the page that they haven’t even updated it since November. And they’re not the only one. A lot of national sites make the same mistake, and moreover their tax credit information was clearly written in November (i.e., lots of references to “The government just passed….” something that’s been in play now for four months).
But it makes us even MORE nuts that two months after we launched HomeBuyerTaxCredit.com, Google is still displaying sites like that at the top of the search results, propagating out of date and inaccurate information. Two months after we launched a site that has been widely acclaimed as the best site on the internet, one with about 30,000 words providing a comprehensive analysis of the credit and a blog that has answered over 150 questions/comments about the credit, Google still hasn’t found us. Search “home buyer tax credit” on Google and you can’t find us.
And it makes us even MORE nuts — pulling out your hair and rolling on the ground nuts — that this is all happening while we’re PAYING Google for search engine marketing, with our site showing up as one of the “paid” ads that most people ignore at the top or side of the search results. We’ve spent thousands of dollars with Google promoting the site, finding that we’re getting about seven times the number of ad clicks that most ads get, meaning that people are going to our site at a high rate when they find it.
So when people come, they’re getting what they want, but we have to pay to get them here rather than getting the organic search that a site with hundreds of inbound links, active content, videos, all that good SEO stuff. And we’ve had SEO experts look at the site for us (our thanks to our techie friends at Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate for setting that up), and tell us that the search engine optimization on the site is great. All we hear is that it “takes time” for Google to find you. (And some people suspect that Google might not be so quick to add you to organic search if they’ve got you paying for ads from search results, although I just can’t believe that’s true.)
But meanwhile, go search for “Home Buyer Tax Credit” on Bing, which has reportedly created a much more nimble search engine system (I don’t pretend to understand this stuff — I’m just the writer), and we show up in the top two search results. We’re all over Bing. And when I look at the other links that show up on the first page, I generally find fresher material on the tax credit that’s more accurate and more recently updated.
So I don’t know if our experience is universal, but if it is, I’d have to say that when I need to search for fresh information, I’m now more likely to go to Bing. Unless there’s something unique about the search terms “home buyer tax credit” that generate out of date search results on Google, it’s pretty clear that Bing is more nimble than Google search.
This is sad for me, because I love Google. I love gmail, I use Google Reader, I use iGoogle as my home page, I use Google Docs all the time (including the amazing Google forms for some of the information on this blog), and I’m on the waiting list for Google Voice (and have been for about a year — what’s up with that?). But when it comes to search, it’s clear to me that Bing is right now cleaning Google’s clock.
Update: For those of you interested in comparing Bing vs. Google for searches that you care about, check out www.bing-vs_google.com, which allows a side-by-side comparison. Clever.
Couldn’t agree more!!!