Bing SEO

[a1anm]

Everything I read is about optimizing your site for Google and improving your Google ranking. However, I've been wondering about Bing. Is there anything in particular I should be doing to boost my rankings on Bing or do the same rules apply as with Google?

[nahoms]

I think bing is more designed for updated blogs and articles...

[bogs]

as far as i know when you rank well on google then everything usually follows.. and i also noticed bing loves authority sites..

[jacks smith]

mu experience tell that it's working on back links more then other one

[JJMcClure]

This is what I've noticed so far but I haven't put any serious time into this yet. Not worth the effort in the UK frankly.


1. Bing and Yahoo rankings vary significantly, bing is clearly operating on a new set of criteria from Yahoo but Bing results seem to be closer to Google than Yahoo is/was

2. Exact phrases early in the page Title seem to be much more important than on Y or G

3. Bing allows more than one page from a site to rank in the top ten without it being indented (does Bing even indent? Haven't seen any yet)

4. IBLs don't seem to matter as much to Bing (?), there's still a focus on on-page factors like with MSN

5. (Tentatively) going to suggest that domain age is more important to Bing

6. Bing ranks video the same way Google does, unlike Yahoo

7. Keyword phrase in domain name more important for Bing?

[jakab]

The bing search engine follows a different set of algorithms.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by jakab

The bing search engine follows a different set of algorithms.

Noooooo! Does it? Do you know what they are?

[Mike Smithfield]

No one know the algorithms of each! But an important factor on bing is the Domain Age, thats a key to have higher ranks.

[JeffWalden]

As Google says time and time again, just build your websites to be usable for real users and write quality content. This is the simplest rule to follow and holds true for any of the major search engines.

The idea of writing quality content is that you're naturally accumulate backlinks which are obviously a key factor when it comes to Google. I'm not sure how key these are to Bing but they are definitely a factor.

Bing has a webmaster center (http://www.bing.com/webmaster) but it doesn't give much information relative to Google.

I have noticed that my website rankings are extremely volatile in Bing but tend to hold steady in Yahoo and Google. This would indicate that Bing uses a key factor that isn't used in either Yahoo or Google.

I agree with JJMcClure that the keywords early in the title seem to be a large factor with Bing.

[computerbarry]

as far as i know when you rank well on google then everything usually follows..

On the contra bogs, all my sites that rank well in google are no where to be seen in bing or yahoo.

just build your websites to be usable for real users and write quality content

I second that.

The idea of writing quality content is that you're naturally accumulate backlinks which are obviously a key factor when it comes to Google.

Yes good point, but that's exactly what most web companies do day in day out, build back links for there clients, so technical speaking: if you build a good site with quality content and wait for people to backlink, your then at a disadvantage to your competition if that's all your rely on.

my 2 cents

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by computerbarry

if you build a good site with quality content and wait for people to backlink, your then at a disadvantage to your competition if that's all your rely on.

Might take longer but the links you get will be genuinely deserved and much less likely to get nerfed by Google in a google slap. Always better to take longer to build a more slap resilient ranking than a dodgy weak ranking IMO.

[computerbarry]

Always better to take longer to build a more slap resilient ranking than a dodgy weak ranking IMO.

Yes defiantly JJ, from experience it's always better, especially if your links are coming from all sorts of link farms and saturated partner pages, it's just when you have a very persistent client telling you they want the website on the first page

I've built a number of sites with just quality content, well structured markup and good paying keywords, key phrases and no links, compared to dodgy sites with poor links 'as above' and ranked higher... meaning; the poor links aren't having any effect.

[Matt Mickiewicz]

There's an eBook about how to rank on Bing at: http://sitepointd.msncode.hop.clickbank.net . It's quite an easy algorithm to master if you're willing to invest a bit of time in doing the legwork to make the rankings happen.

[JeffWalden]

Originally Posted by JJMcClure

Might take longer but the links you get will be genuinely deserved and much less likely to get nerfed by Google in a google slap. Always better to take longer to build a more slap resilient ranking than a dodgy weak ranking IMO.

I wish every user in the SEO forum would read this comment. It seems like this statement is so rarely understood and followed.

[CourierQuotes]

I am starting to get a little bit of traffic from bing as noted in analytics will be interested to see if the traffic and numbers increase - Ironic that I have to measure it through google

[Nikki Loney]

I have found it very difficult to optimise on Bing, Google is far easier, but that is perhaps because there is more information on this.

[Eric_HE]

I seldom use Bing,before i had a try ,but i do not think it is good enough.

[seoevans]

every search engine have different algorithm, google seo is very common and most of us are aware of it, but for bing seo more focus oninternal site linking and content.
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[bakers]

not really sure about bing. maybe we say its hard since we are not that familiar with it as much as to google.

[sb225]

I know how google works but bing is very hard to understand.and my sites doesnt rank in bing at all

[cyc]

I haven't changed our bing strategy for our main website. We're slowly getting more and more visitors from them, its quite poor compared to Google though. But It's trending upwards, albeit very slowly!

[searchmarketing]

I don't think there is seperate optimization techniques for bing and yahoo. As we know that max 80 % of the search market business is handled by Google in web marketing. If you optimize for google that is more than enough. The search algorithm changes from search engine to search engine.
misearchenginemarketingdotcom

[Stevie D]

I haven't done any site optimisation specifically for Bing (or Google or anyone else) - but even if I was working on particular strategies for individual search engines, I wouldn't waste time on anything other than Google.

I have just done a few searches that I would expect to pull up pages from my website, and it is performing at least as well in Bing and Yahoo! as it does in Google ... but Google sends me 25 times more visitors than Bing, and 30 times more than Yahoo!.

Unless you know that your site demographics are skewed in a way that means your target market is much more likely than average to use Bing (or any other non-Google search engine), putting any effort into targeting those search engines specifically is unlikely to be an effective use of time.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by Stevie D

I haven't done any site optimisation specifically for Bing (or Google or anyone else) - but even if I was working on particular strategies for individual search engines, I wouldn't waste time on anything other than Google.

I have just done a few searches that I would expect to pull up pages from my website, and it is performing at least as well in Bing and Yahoo! as it does in Google ... but Google sends me 25 times more visitors than Bing, and 30 times more than Yahoo!.

Unless you know that your site demographics are skewed in a way that means your target market is much more likely than average to use Bing (or any other non-Google search engine), putting any effort into targeting those search engines specifically is unlikely to be an effective use of time.

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel about it too. It's still worth a little effort to figure out how it works though if we can.

[hitmanuk2k]

We've observed sites ranking a lot quicker in Bing than what they do in Google - newer pages/sites I mean. There doesn't appear to be any "sandbox" like effect which holds back many sites in Google in their first year.

As others have mentioned a well constructed keyword dense title tag seems to carry a lot of weight with Bing.

Given it's market share in the UK at the moment optimising for Bing just isn't worth while for most of our clients, and I imagine it will be a similar story for most other brands. Focus on doing things right for Google and you can expect to see improvements elsewhere too.