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.