Summary: There are a number of factors that (it’s thought) Bing places greater emphasis on in comparison to Google, and a number of practices it allows which Google doesn’t allow. However, be careful not to jeopardise your Google rankings when optimising for Bing.
Firstly, let’s talk Bing! Bing.com used to be Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search (you can understand why they went with ‘Bing’, slightly more catchy). Bing is advertised as a ‘decision engine’ but it’s essentially a search engine. It was unveiled in May 2009 and released fully in June 2009. Have a look on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_search_engine) if you’d like the whole history and a summary of Bing’s features.
So how do you get a good Bing ranking? It’s thought that Bing is moving closer towards Google’s algorithms by the day but certain differences have been observed by SEO experts.
For example:
- Bing seems to like keywords in the domain name.
- Bing seems to really like keywords in the subdomain name.
- Bing doesn’t care so much about the trust/authority of the domain that a particular page is hosted on – it looks more at the pages themselves.
- Bing places extra importance on the home page.
- Bing doesn’t mind low quality links as much as Google does.
- Bing likes exact match anchor text (even for low quality links).
- Bing doesn’t care so much if you use link farms.
- Bing doesn’t care much if you get links from sites on the same IP C-block.
- Bing doesn’t care for 301 redirects.
- Bing cares more about keywords on the page, and additionally, about related keywords on the page.
Other experts have observed:
- A much slower crawl time than Google – likely because their infrastructure isn’t comparative.
- A more picky approach. This doesn’t seem consistent with the above list at first glance but the reason that Bing are picky is likely because they haven’t yet developed adequate spam filters (that filter out some of the above practices) and so they have to be more choosy about what they index – sites with good quality links from other authoritative websites are more likely to gain that initial trust and get in the index (after that, Bing appears to be more flexible about the quality of links, for example, as stated above).
Be careful – if you optimise your site for Bing based on the above list, you could jeopardise your Google rankings (for example, by using link farms). Whilst Bing appears to be growing in popularity and is the third largest search engine on the web (going on search volume), it currently commands only 3.16%, in comparison with Google at 85.35% and Yahoo at 6.15% (Source: Net Applications, 2010). Also, Bing in time will develop its ability to detect spam and is likely to continue its trend towards using algorithms like Google, so employing spammy techniques, even if they are currently unlikely to be detrimental to Bing rankings, is ill advised.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!