Google, Bing Both Win More Search Market Share

Another month and another new release of comScore search engine rankings for the U.S. for May 2013. Google and Bing are both up, while the other top search engines comScore tracks (Yahoo, Ask, AOL) were flat or saw declines.

Not surprisingly, Google led the way for search share in May, and grew its search market share to 66.7 percent, up from 66.5 percent in April. Google has the identical search share of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013.

Bing grew to 17.4 percent in May, up from 17.3 percent in April. This is a significant increase from its 15.4 percent search market share in May 2012.

Meanwhile, Yahoo dropped slightly from 12 percent in April to 11.9 percent in May. Yahoo is down considerably from May 2012, when it had a 13.4 percent search market share.

This continues the trend of Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo simply swapping search share rather than making inroads on Google’s massive search share.

Ask held steady at 2.7 percent from April to May, but AOL's search market share fell to 1.3 percent, down from 1.5 percent. AOL's search market share has only been this low one other time, when it previously hit this record low in August 2011.

When looking at the 20 billion search queries conducted in May specifically, Google remained static with 13.4 billion, while again Microsoft gained 1 percent to 3.5 billion searches, while Yahoo lost 1 percent to 2.4 billion. Interestingly, AOL lost 8 percent of search queries over the previous month.

Google Search Ranking Changes To Auto-Correct Your Mobile SEO Mistakes

Is your site not doing a good job for mobile visitors? Better get that fixed. Sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile or smartphone search results, in the future.
Bad Mobile Site? Fewer Smartphone Search Rankings, For You

Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far said about the change in a blog post today:

To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.

They followed by sharing two common mobile configuration mistakes of many and suggested these search ranking changes will help import the smartphone search experience for Google users.
Faulty Redirects

The first issue is called a “faulty” redirect, when a page listed in search may redirect all smartphone users to the same single mobile page, rather than to a mobile-optimized version of the page they’re after:

 

Smartphone-Only Error
The second common mistake is that smartphone users, when trying to access a web page listed in search, get an error and nothing listed.
 

Optimizing For Mobile
Google also says that if you properly configure your mobile friendly pages, it will “improve the mobile web, make your users happy, and allow searchers to experience and experience your content fully.”