How To Rank Well On Bing?

-By Premchand Chandran

Why Bing Is Important?

4,950,000,000

95,800,000

Search Engine Oct'13 Sept'13 Aug’13

Google 66.9 66.9 66.9

Bing 18.1 18 17.8

Yahoo 11.1 11.3 11.4

Ask 2.5 2.5 2.6

AOL 1.3 1.3 1.3

Overall Traffic Distribution via Search Engines in US (%)

Disclaimer

All the points, snapshots and images in this presentation are

for representation purpose only. Resemblance to any person

living or dead or any incident or place is purely coincidental.

Also, the points in this presentation are consolidated from

various sources – hours of research went into this by various

internet marketing enthusiasts.

Thus, DO NOT consider this as a BIBLE, BHAGAVAD GITA or

QURAN! If algorithms could have been easily cracked, then

this place would have been heaven!

FLASH CONTENT

While Google is fairly hostile to Flash, Bing doesn't mind a flash-heavy site.

If a website has a lot of Flash, there is high chance of it ranking on Bing

provided it is well optimized with the proper on-page optimization elements.

BACKLINKS

Linking has always been a very important ranking factor in the search engine

optimization field.

Bing adores quality inbound links and gives a bit more weight to it than the

other search engines do.

SITE STRUCTURE

A website which is easily crawlable by the search engines is usually easily

navigated by the user as well.

Hence it becomes very user friendly for both the user and the search engine. All

search engines favor clean, easy-to-navigate architecture, fast-loading pages, and

easy-to-follow links.

INBOUND

ANCHOR TEXT

The number of quality inbound links might be of less importance for Bing but the

anchor text certainly matters more.

We must try using quality anchor text to rank well on Bing.

WEBSITE AUTHORITY

We are aware by now how important age is to Google, and Bing feels even more

strongly about it.

This is not to say that they completely ignore a newer domain name but generally

the rankings are low.

PAGE RANK

On Bing, if you try performing a search for a competitive keyword – you would

observe PR1 and PR2 websites among the top 10 results.

This implies that even a low PR website can rank on the first page on Bing

whereas it is very difficult to see such scenarios on Google.

PR 2

PR 1

FRESH CONTENT

Fresh content to Bing is not as vital as it is to Google.

This can also be related to domain age since older pages rank higher than the

newer pages in Bing. According to SEO experts – longer blog posts, more content

on web pages and longer articles would matter more to Bing.

ALGORITHMIC

COMPLEXITY

No Penguin! No Panda! Bing's algorithm is not as complex as Google’s.

With Bing, there will be no frequent update in algorithms and even if any, there is

a long way for Bing to come in comparison with Google's algorithmic updates.

So for now at least, a good ranking can be achieved more easily on Bing than on

Google (Black Hat Still Persists :P).

CRAWLABILITY

Bing takes longer to crawl websites than Google, probably because Bing as of

now is not as advanced as Google.

Hence it takes longer for changes made on the pages indexed by Bing to affect

rankings. The result being that you may have to wait a while to see the impact

of your Bing specific optimization efforts.

ONLY ONE WEBSITE – STRIKE A BALANCE

For the same reason, we should avoid going overboard with the techniques

that still may work for Bing, but not for Google.

Excessive use of these techniques – including keyword stuffing or over-

optimizing your backlink anchor text could trigger Google penalties.

Quick Learnings - Summary

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN GOOGLE & BING

Links hold a lot of weight – Make sure you have quality backlinks pointing to your site and good

internal links to help navigation.

Both offer local results for users – Consider focusing your content and optimization on

keywords related to your location.

Both engines offer paid results – Make sure you get involved with Google AdWords or Bing’s

AdCenter while still working to improve your search engine optimization.

Both use domain name as a factor for ranking – Try to make sure your domain name includes a

keyword that is directly related to what your company offers.

Quick Learnings - Summary

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GOOGLE & BING

1. Forums

Google: Google doesn’t seem to mind forums as long as they are of good quality and

spam free. Many forums even show up on page one.

Bing: Bing does not like forums. According to State of Search, 90% of forum results

show up further down Bing results than Google results.

2. Ambiguous Searches

Google: If someone was to search for something that could have two different

meanings, Google is more likely to put the most popular websites at the top of

your SERP. In other words, Google likes to focus on brand.

Bing: When an ambiguous search is performed, Bing usually likes to bring up

local results first.

Quick Learnings - Summary

3. Flash Content

Google: Google dislikes Flash.

Bing: Webpages created with flash are far more likely to rank well on Bing.

4. Matching Keywords

Google: Google does a pretty good job understanding synonyms and the context

surrounding a keyword. This allows a website to have a little bit more creativity.

Bing: It’s important to try and use the keywords to want to rank well for verbatim

when trying to optimize for Bing.

Quick Learnings - Summary

Once we have optimized for Bing, we have also optimized for Yahoo!

Yes, Yahoo results are powered by Bing!! This implies, if we are

optimizing for Google first and Bing second, our third-search engine is

pretty damn simple.

Bing SEO Ranking Factors 2013 Study By SearchMetrics

The top five key findings were:

(1) Top brands rank higher on Bing, as they do in Google

(2) Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings on Bing

(3) Social signals closely linked to higher rankings

(4) Quality content is important for search rankings

(5) On page technical factors are a must have