Accompanied by a lot of speculation and anticipation, Bing.com was recently beta launched by Microsoft as a replacement to their MSN search engine.  MSN, as many SEOs agree, is a fairly “easy” engine to optimize for.  Since its focus tends to be more on “on page” optimization, many webmasters had better luck with MSN than with Google.  Based on some webmasters’ reports with Adsense-powered pages, MSN traffic produced more clicks than with Google.  Understandably, many webmasters and site publishers are nervous about the Bing changeover since Bing uses a differing ranking algorithm than MSN.

We looked at the recent stats of one of our more established inhouse mainstream blogs.  Based on the initial results, Bing actually produces better traffic quality than either MSN or Google.

Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge:

Quality of Traffic: Bing vs. Google

Based on these figures,  search traffic from Bing had a lower bounce rate and viewed more pages than visitors from Live.com, MSN, and Google.  For adsense-centric sites, bounce rate and page views are key indicators of traffic quality and likelihood of Adsense clickthroughs.

Quantity of Traffic: Bing vs. Google

As for actual SERP rankings for the test site, volume traffic keywords that were #1 at Google with nested multiple listings were #2 to #4 on Bing.  We’ll keep monitoring this to see if it changes.

Photo Credits:  The Bing Logo is a registered Trademark of Microsoft Corporation.  Its use here is strictly for review, illustrative, and other legally permissible uses.