From the time when Microsoft launched its Bing search engine, it has drawn a great number of attention (and gossip) from the SEO community. On one hand, this is pretty logical for the reason that Bing is planned to be an additional strong player and it is likely to cut some share from Google search engine. On the other hand, this is almost the first time a new strong player comes to the ring, so possibly the expectations that Bing will put an end to Google’s monopoly are baseless. At rest, Bing is quite special (in a optimistic way) from the other search engines and this is its most important strength.
What’s different with bing?
The first feeling you find when you go to Bing.com is that it is special – the background makes it attractive but in no doubt, there have been a lot of other cases of search engines with plenty of graphical add-ons to mask their irrelevant search algorithms. Though, when you type a search query, the results you get are a pleasant surprise because they are relevant.
It is this relevance of search results that fears SEO experts. The results you get when you search with Bing are relevant, yet they are extremely different from Google’s. In fact, no issue if you search with Google or with Bing (or if you go to Bing, you can compare the result sets side by side), you search out relevant results and the two sets are very different from one another.
One of the most essential things SEO experts are interested to know about Bing is its algorithm. Obviously, Bing’s algorithm is dissimilar from Google’s for the reason that when the search term is the same but the set of results is different, a difference in the algorithm is the clear answer. In fact, the question is closely what is different between the two algorithms and if the difference is so drastic that it makes it compulsory to reoptimize a site for Bing.
What to do for now?
Wait. This is the initial thing you have to do. At present it is too early to say what steps (if any) are necessary in turn to optimize your site for Bing.
Moreover, despite of how hopeful Bing looks, it is still untimely to predict if it will turn into a real competitor to Google or if it will become one more unsuccessful attempt to triumph over Google. Let’s see how users respond – will they start Binging more or will they support Google. When it becomes clear that Bing will be able to make it, then it will make sense to optimize for it as well. So for now the best you can do is wait.
What will help you out to be in the best position on bing?
As you probably guess, the proper algorithm of Bing is not openly available and because of that there is a lot of gossip about what weighs more for Bing (in comparison to Google) and what weighs less. A lot of SEO experts test different search queries, analyze the results, and based on that try to understand what of the known SEO strategy works with Bing.
Some SEO experts still believe that Bing is actually Live Search in new clothes (i.e. user interface), although others say that there are visible differences between Live Search and Bing. But there is no doubt that for now Bing is a considerable improvement over Live Search in terms of relevance of search results.
Bing is hardly the first time when there is no agreement in the SEO community about the details of the algorithm but if we can review, here are some factors, which are (or at least are strongly believed to be) of importance when Bing optimization is concerned:
• Value of backlinks doesn’t matter: If you judge against the first 10 results in Bing and Google, it is clear that all equal, the winners in Bing have less backlinks than the winners in Google. It is unclear if nofollow matters with Bing.
• Anchor text matters more: The amount of value inbound links may be of less importance for Bing but the anchor text surely matters more. In fact, since anchor text is one of the measurements of the quality of inbound links, it isn’t greatly different. Get quality anchor text and you will do well in both Bing and Google.
• Could’t helped out with link spaming: Seeing as the quantity of backinks (even if they are of ultimate quality) seems to be of less importance to Bing, link spamming will be even less helpful than with Google.
• Onpage factors are more important: This is one of the most controversial points. Lots of SEO experts disagree but many also think that onpage factors matter more with Bing than with Google: At rest, it has nothing to do with the 90s, when onpage factors were tentative.
• Right matters: If this is correct, this is bad news for bloggers and small sites for the reason that it means that search results are unclear in favor of older sites and/or sites of trustworthy organizations. Age of domain is also very essential with Bing – even more than with Google.
• Page rank is less important: When you do a search for a competitive keyword and you see a couple of PR2 or even PR1 sites among the top 10 results, this may make you wonder. On Google this is barely possible but on Bing it looks quite normal.
• Content is less important: Bing looks a little conservative – or possibly it just can’t index sites that quickly – but it seems that fresh content is not as vital as with Google. This is associated with the age of domain specifics and accordingly you will see ancient pages rank high (but these olden pages are relevant to the search query).
• Binging is Flash-friendly: Optimizing a Flash site for Google is somewhat a nightmare for SEO experts. It is too soon to say but it looks like Bing is more Flash-friendly, which is excellent news to all sites where Flash is (still) heavily employed. Websites with very high page rank doesn’t matter a lot to the bing what does in reality matters now for bing is quality of the page.
For the time being it is too early to say which factors are of primary importance with Bing. But the truth that their search results are relevant means that their algorithm is really particular. Well, possibly the relevant results in Bing are because of the fact that web masters were taken by surprise and they haven’t had the time to optimize for Bing. Therefore, the content is genuine; there are no SEO gimmicks and artificial pumping. We’ll see if this will continue with the same in future, when web masters learn how to optimize for Bing additionally!!!