Tired of Google? - Using Bing and DuckDuckGo for Podcast Growth

Back in the day, Google won the search engine wars by being faster and better. Fast forward to 2024, and in my opinion, they're horrible. And so I started using alternative search engines, and then it dawned on me. Am I listed in Bing and these other places? Well, what do you gotta do to make sure? Let's talk about it.

I don't know what triggers it, but there are times when I go over to Google, do a search, and it spits out some sort of crazy AI result that almost doesn't make sense. And I don't know if you're like me, but I look at the website to kind of figure out, alright. Am I gonna trust this website? And it's getting so bad that somebody said, oh, you ought to use Bing, which, of course, is Microsoft search engine. They said, you can even earn a little bit of

money by using it. And I was like, really? So I went over and started using it, and I was like, oh, this looks like what used to be Google. And then somebody said, oh, you should go to DuckDuckGo, which is a search engine that, I would say, you know, again, both of these are nowhere near the market share of Google. But DuckDuckGo's claim to fame is they're very much focused on privacy of people using their service.

And so I was like, And it just dawned on me. I was like, well, if I'm not using Google as much as I used to, maybe you're not using Google as much as you do, and maybe you're going to Bing or maybe you're going to DuckDuckGo or I'm not crazy about using ChatGPT as a search engine. That scares me, actually. If ChatGPT wins the search engine thing, that's like one source. You know, what they say goes where at least with a search engine, you see a page of results.

Now with Google, half of it is ads. That's the other one. If I do get actual results, I've gotta scroll down towards the bottom before I get to something that's not an ad because I want, I don't know, an organic result. Call me crazy. And so it dawned on me, well and if somebody goes over and searches for School of Podcasting in Bing, do we show up? And I went in and just I went over to Google and said, how do I submit my show to Bing? And so I thought I would talk about these things.

It's not hard at all. It's one of the things you should probably do. Takes you all of maybe 5 to 10 minutes.

It's not hard. As you might imagine, it's bing.com /webmaster/about if you wanna go to the full page there. And there's a button there that says add a site. Well, that's pretty easy. It'll also ask you if you want. You can pull your stuff in from Google search console. So we'll talk about that in a second. But it was super easy to do, but they're going to have you verify the domain. Now what does that mean? Well, we do this every

day with, like, double authentication and such and such. And so what they're gonna do is have you go into your domain. So if that's through GoDaddy or Namecheap or cooler websites, whatever, You have to go into your DNS and add a c name with a bunch of gibberish, and then you click save. Give it about 5 minutes for that to kind of propagate. Then then you go back to Bing and say, hey. Check my website. And when they see the gobbledygook that you just

put there, they're like, oh, you own that site. And so at that point, they have verified you. And the other thing you want to do, and this is kind of a set it and forget it kind of thing, I'm assuming you have a site map. Now what is a site map on your website? A site map, if

you click on it, looks like a bunch of gobbledygook. But it's basically anytime you make a change, you add a page or something to your website or a blog post or, I don't know, a podcast episode, it goes in the site map, and it's exactly what you might think it is with the word map. Google looks at this and it says, oh, we added a new page, a new post, a new blog post, whatever. It's over there. And if you wanna see all the pages on my website, Google, here's

this. It's a site map. And what's cool is if you're using podpage, it is your website.com/sitemap. It's that easy. In fact, I'll talk about those in a commercial later, but that's easy. Now if you're using WordPress, they have a built in site map as well. It's whatever your domain is /wpdash sitemap dot XML, and I'll put a link to that so you don't have

to remember that out in the show notes. But by telling a search engine, watch this, every time you update your site with something new, it then is there for Google to then see in the site map. And we're talking about alternatives to Google, but you might also wanna go, hey. Am I listed in Google? Or if your traffic goes down, one of the things both the the Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Engine Console do is if there's a problem with your

website, they can let you know, hey. We're not indexing this anymore because, you know, you've got malware or something or whatever is going on. But you can submit your show to Google by going into the search console. That's it. Search.google.com/searchconsole/about. Because, you know, Google search engine console.com or something would have been way too easy. And, links to those out in the show

notes. And this one's fairly easy as well. The only thing that's slightly different is when you go to submit your show in Google search, they call it a property, not a website. And that kinda ties into Google Analytics and the same thing, the little, you know, hokey pokey turn yourself

around thing you have to do here is you have to submit your sitemap. So we know what that is. We just learned about that with Bing. And, again, Google is gonna make sure that you are the owner of this website. And so you're gonna have to go through and they're gonna add some stuff to your domain. I think it's the easiest way to do this. You can also upload files and then point them at the file because, again, if you use, like, FTP to upload this, the only people that can do

that are people that own the website. So, I just went ahead. And what's cool is with me, I was using, I think, in this case, GoDaddy. And if you log in to GoDaddy, it just automatically goes into GoDaddy, adds this gibberish to your domain that doesn't affect anything, and then you go back. Now when you go to verify with both of these units, you have to kinda wait about 5 minutes for that change to propagate. There's a 50¢ word. Across the Internet. So then when it checks to

see, hey, is that gibberish in their domain record? If it's there, it'll be like, okay, you're good. And at that point, you can go into your domain and delete that record. It's a c name or a text record or something like that. But it's just things that it does to prove that you own that website. And from there, again, you can

see what's going on. And they're very basic, but it does if you ever wanna see what's bringing in the most traffic to your website, you can see that from the Google search console without going into Google Analytics. So I looked into what was the top search engine, and I know, shocking, Google with basically 91%. Bing is second at 3. Yeah. Then Yahoo, also at 3. Naver, I've never heard of, n e v e r, and DuckDuckGo at 0.35%.

And so when I looked into how do you submit your show to Yahoo, it said the same thing that DuckDuckGo said. Use Bing Webmaster Tools. So by putting your show or your website in Bing, you've kinda killed 2 birds with one stone. And, yes, that means you'll get maybe found in 6.3% more search engines than you did before. But I'm here to tell you, if you've got your domain open, this takes all of

5 minutes per, you know, Bing and per DuckDuckGo. Well, actually, if you do Bing, you're good. And if you're not in Google, you should. But these are one of those things you do maybe 15, 20 minutes tops, and you are done. And then like we said, when you point these tools at your sitemap, you're good to go. It's nice to check-in every now and then. I know every now and then I

will get something from, Google search console that's like, hey, something's wacky with your website. So that's another reason to have these set up just to make sure everything is working because we don't know what's gonna happen with websites, with AI, and things like that. But the the bottom line is you want your website there to be found in the event people are searching. And who knows? Maybe AI is using these tools to find websites to populate its

little language model system. So we shall see, but I'll have links out in the show notes with videos. Now these videos are from the growing your podcast course at the School of Podcasting, but I'll put

them there so you can click and watch. It's just it's a very small portion of that class, and you can see what I'm talking about. It is kinda nerdy when we start talking about I know for me, I hate domains. There's just it it just seems especially with GoDaddy, every time I go in, they've changed the interface, and I'm like, I just need the DNS stuff. And so if you need help with this, go out to your podcast website.com and, send me a note. Maybe we can figure out how to get you set up the

way you need to go. So that's gonna do it for this episode of your podcast website. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you know somebody who hates Google search engine, you might wanna point them at this one and go, hey. Have you tried Bing? Did you know you can make money at with Bing doing search engines? Yeah. It's true. Not a lot, but what the heck? Last time I checked, pennies make dollars. And, point them at this or just tell them to go to your podcastwebsite.com/follow.

Now if you have any comments on today's show, simply go to your podcast website.com/voice mail. I'd love to

hear from you. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I help podcasters. It's what I do. Your podcast website is part of the Power of Podcasting Network. Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at powerofpodcasting.com.