XpresSpa Group Inc (XSPA)

[xlt leader]

Another example of the rivalry between MSFT and GOOG.

Bing’s SEO Tag Gag

Bing’s other April Fools’ joke aims at the funny bone. And the SEO community.

It’s an announcement of a new “SEO tag” – a piece of code that lets webmasters tell Bing where their pages should rank because “it’s time you take control of not just your SEO work, but of your rankings as well!” Hehe. Nice. Here’s what the (fake) code looks like:

bing-seo-tag

The second line of code tells Bing to make sure your page ranks one spot higher than your competition.

I probably should’ve said this joke is “mostly” aimed at the funny bone, because there’s also a dig at Google in this announcement. Bing says one of the reasons for the new SEO tag is that the company has “seen the positive feedback generated by this desire to partner with websites, instead of keeping them in the dark about important data by blocking it or not sharing it.”

Bing is referring there to Google’s [not provided] keyword referrals — data that Google has only been sharing with AdWords advertisers since October 2011.

We’ll keep an eye on Bing and update this post if they launch any more April Fools’ Day jokes … at Google’s expense or not.