It seems Bing is so confident in some of their search results they’ve removed the pagination links to additional search result pages. Last week Bing was seen showing only one page of search results for some long-tail queries like “specifications for black iphone 6 64GB”.
In these cases the footer of Bing’s search results apparently doesn’t include standard pagination links to more pages of results,but instead a message that reads: “We think these are the most relevant results for your search. We’ve omitted some lower-quality results.”
Here’s what this looks like compared to a normal search results footer.
Generally the feedback we saw to this was pretty negative and we wonder if Bing has since had a change of heart because we’re unable to replicate the result. When we search on Bing for specifications for black iphone 6 64GB we just see normal paginated results in the footer.
Let us know in the comments section below if you can see it.
Why should you care?
Bing has such small market share in NZ that this is unlikely to have much of an impact. However what it does do is serve as a strong reminder of how important it is to rank on page one of search results.
Irrespective of whether or not a search engine chooses to only show one page of results or many, the reality is that very few people bother with results after page 1, as the chart below clearly shows.
Source AWR Google Organic CTR History study
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Jeremy and Mark are two of the partners behind SureFire Search. Despite their deceptively youthful appearances, both have worked in search marketing for many years. To put that in context, Google didn't even exist when Jeremy started.
