SEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 29, 2009 | Share This
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Google’s ubiquity in search is such that many clients feel that a website that is optimized for Google is good to go. Today’s announcement of a search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft ought to put a decisive fork in that thinking. Consider this – the combined share of the market that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will have is nearly 30%. Assuming this holds, businesses simply can’t afford not to optimize towards Bing’s algorithm when it will be powering results for both Bing and Yahoo.
So how different is Bing from Google when it comes to SEO?
The biggest difference is the weight given to what goes on offsite in the forms of links, something of a Google specialty that Bing gives much less weight to. On the other hand Bing does give much more weight to the domain name within a site’s URL to determine search rankings. There are a host of other differences that can add up to noticeable disparities in how a site is organically ranked on Google and Bing search results.
What will be interesting to see is how much of Bing’s most innovative aspect – how results are displayed and organized – comes to Yahoo. Right now, the layout and organization of results pages in Bing can give clues to what content needs to be created or altered on unoptimized websites. As an example, the related categories tool can give businesses the opportunity to optimize for several placements on the same results page.
Bing also pulls additional content into the preview pane on its organic search results, which means proper optimization should take into account the increased scope of information pulled from site and page description data to determine the best placement of key terms.
Yahoo would be foolish not to incorporate these features into results, but will they also incorporate Bing’s unique Travel and Shopping results, presumably as an enhancement or replacement for their own Travel and Shopping channels? The answer is still unclear but travel sites and retailers should be taking a close look at Bing and optimizing for it now so that when the Microsoft/Yahoo deal kicks in next year, they have a head start on ranking for the 30% chunk of the market the combined duo is likely to represent.
Topics: Google, Microsoft, SEO, Search: News, Technology, Yahoo! |
[…] Noah Mallin wrote an interesting post today onSEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now | SearchViews – Daily <b>…</b>Here’s a quick excerpt […]
Wow! Finally Microsoft has reached a deal Yahoo for an internet search partnership. Will the newly announced deal between giants Microsoft and Yahoo be a good thing? Got to wait and see. But atleast Microsoft and Yahoo deal is straightforward and not complex at all and ofcourse, the negotiation talks have been going for long. I was just curious to know all the past negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo so collected all the articles and links (more than 200) related to the current merger and the previous events or negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo. If you are interested check the link below.
http://markthispage.blogspot.com/2009/07/saga-of-microsoft-and-yahoo-from-2007.html
Bing gives a lot of importance to the following factors :
1. Keyword density in title-tag
2. Keyword density in content
While for google, a 2-4% content density is acceptable, bing gives more credence to even 6-8% keyword density as long as it is not spammy.
And yes, keyword density in domain is given a high weightage.
But given the fact that Bing rankings will become easier to manipulate, bing will have to modify this algorithm to factor in the value of the content and usage metrics.
Any thoughts on that?
[…] biggest difference is the weight given to what goes on offsite in the forms of links,” describes search views columnist Noah Mallin. He says that Bing gives much less weight to […]
Nice tips. Now its for everyone to optimize for Bing, now we have to take care of the URL as well as meta tags. If you are good in these two things then you can easily divert traffic to your site.
Thanks for the cool stuff.
Keyword density used to be the major way that search engines created their results. It got to the point, in the dark days of web search engines, where you had to wade through thousands of items before even finding one single piece of useful information…is this what’s going to happen to Bing? Yes, most likely if that’s going to be the major factor they take into account as to whether or not a page is in fact a valid hit on a keyword search. That’s the most easily manipulated facet of online content and it would certainly be abused by every black hat SEO and marketer on the planet.
Just ran a little test with Bing regarding meta tags.
While it’s common knowledge Google ignores the keywords meta tag (my website’s position on GOOG didn’t flinch when I removed them), I dropped off the map on Bing.
Not a big deal, since Bing doesn’t generate a whole lot of traffic for me, but now that they’ve essentially doubled their market share?
I guess it’s time to take Bing seriously.
Nice post, Noah. I recently did a fairly lengthy post on our HyperArts blog about optimizing for Bing. I’m not sure it’s a no-brainer in terms of making both Google & Bing happy, but I do think it’s doable. On the Bing Webmaster Central, they recommend absolute URLs for even your internal links on a website. OK, whatever.
Cheers…
I have to disagree on the keyword in URL BING lately seems to be loving it a lot more than google.