A small design firm is suing Microsoft over the name “Bing”

A small design firm is suing Microsoft over the name “Bing” after claims that the Bing search engine is infringing on their trademark. Bing LLC has been running since 2000 and has a pending trademark application over the Bing name.

According to the lawsuit, Bing LLC claims that Microsoft’s Bing “causes confusion with regard to the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant, confuses the public with regard to the origin of the plaintiff’s services and dilutes the value of the plaintiff’s trademark.”

With the Bing search engine being launched in 2009, there’s no doubt Microsoft would have done their research before deciding on the name. Trademark law does allow firms in different industries to use the same name, so I am not confident this case will have a huge amount of merit.

Here’s what Microsoft had to say, “We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant’s offerings and Microsoft’s Bing,”

Even if the suit doesn’t go ahead, it’s been a good link building exercise for the company, with several media sites now linking to their homepage!

SEO TIps: Are You Splitting Your Home Page Link Value?

Did you know the average website can have 4 different URLs which all link to the home page? In many cases each of the following URLs will all provide the same home page content:

• www.example.com
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com
• example.com/index.html

If you happen to have links going to each variation of this page, you’ll end up with a 4-way split in link value! Obviously, this is going to result in lost rankings and duplicate content issues, so lets look at best way to address this.

1. The first step is to decide on which URL you would like to use. In the large majority of cases this is going to be www.example.com
2. Next, make sure all your internal links point to the URL you have decided above. For example, if your logo or “home” link points to “/index.html” change this to www.example.com.
3. Another good idea is to add a 301 (permanent) redirect that points to the URL you would like to be indexed. Using the example above, we would setup a redirect of example.com pointing to www.example.com
4. Finally, Google’s webmaster tools allow you to specify which URL you would like them to use in results. This can be found under Site configuration > Settings. A screenshot is below:

One final tip, when building links to your site, make sure to use the main URL format you would like indexed. While the 301 redirect should pass on any link juice from existing links which have been formatted incorrectly, it is best not to rely on this for the future.

SEO article post