Google and Bing Search Partner Spam List 2022

UPDATED GOOGLE SPREADSHEET – CLICK HERE  *Last updated 1/11/2022

As Google moves to automate more and more within their paid search platform, it becomes harder to manually optimize portions of campaigns. This change starts to chip away at some of the uniqueness that digital marketing agencies and/or digital marketing professionals provide to their clients.

While there is still much left to actively manage within campaigns, there are also new(er) approaches where the effort is put into mitigating waste within the media spend. One unique and rarely discussed potential opportunity is by proactively excluding spam websites from within Search Partners.

The Benefit of Excluding Spam

Why would anyone care about excluding spam from the Google and Bing Search Partners networks?

The logic is that paid search advertising offers a unique opportunity to help businesses get in front of their target audience at the exact right moment of interest or intent. It is the only true intent-based advertising opportunity that exists, making it one of the most valuable digital marketing channels.

An issue that many marketers run into, though, is that the number of searches at any given time is finite. They may want more opportunity within the paid search channel… and the only real option is to turn on “Search Partners” within the Google or Bing Ad platforms (Google calls them “Search Partners,” Bing calls them “Syndicated Partners”).

Telling the Difference Between “Good” vs. “Spammy” Search Partners

So, who are these search partners? They generally consist of second-tier search engines and/or content websites that have search results functionality. Google and Bing basically offer a “take it or leave it” approach with a few exceptions on Bing. So, you basically must take the good with the bad and hope that the overall benefit is worth any waste.

Search partners are usually not shared or easily available anywhere on the Web. We here at Digital Strike want to change that, which is why we’ve rounded up some of the “good” and some less valuable search partners that advertisers may come across online.

“Good” Search Partners

Here are some of the easier to identify search partners that have a large search focus or opportunity and are generally seen as good or valuable. (It is important to note that Google and Bing share many partners between them.)

Google:

• Startpage (https://www.startpage.com/) – 61 million visitors a month*
• Ask.com (https://www.ask.com/) – 52 million visitors a month*
• Info.com (https://info.com/) – 39 million visitors a month*
• Dogpile (https://www.dogpile.com/) – 3 million visitors a month*

Bing:

• Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com/) – 3.5 billion visitors a month*
• DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/) – 980 million visitors a month*
• AOL (https://www.aol.com/) – 247 million visitors a month*
• Ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/) – 137 million visitors a month*

*Similarweb data 1/3/22

They all look like great opportunities to grow paid search advertising opportunities that are not directly happening within Google and Bing. Looking at just these partners, it could be hard to see any potential downside to using search partners.

The problem with using search partners is that there are plenty of more questionable–and more plentiful–“partners” that are much less valuable than the ones listed above.

Less Valuable “Spammy” Search Partners

Below are some partners that seem less-than-valuable and potentially outright spammy for three reasons:

1. They typically have no real traffic of their own.
2. They appear to rely mostly on bot or fake traffic.
3. They are playing some sort of arbitrage across ad platforms.

Google:

• Results Distributor (https://www.resultsdistributor.com/)
• Stumble Upon Results (https://www.stumbleuponresults.com/)
• MyWay (https://hp.myway.com/myway/index.html)
• Foblue (https://us.foblue.com/)

Bing:

• YFIND (https://yfind.io/)
• CSEARCHES (https://csearches.net/)
• iSearch (https://isearch.start.fyi/)
• Keywords Searching (https://www.keywordssearching.com/)

Which Search Partners to Exclude From Partner Campaigns

So, how can you optimize for the search partners opportunity? Google and Bing will not allow you to personally select the premier website search Partners. That said, you can exclude anything you can identify and deem undesirable.

By removing any undesirable search partners, you can potentially remove some of the spam clicks on your ads. That will allow your media spend to go further within the better portion of the “Search Partner” network to where you could actually connect with potential customers.

The problem for many marketers today is actually finding a list of these bad partners. Fortunately, we here at Digital Strike have identified a list of potentially bad search partners; advertisers can use this list as a starting point to review and potentially exclude bad actors from their campaigns.

DOWNLOAD PDF LIST HERE  |  VIEW UPDATED GOOGLE SPREADSHEET HERE

*Last updated 1/11/2022

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