SEO for Bing
June 26 2009
Whenever anybody mentions Search Engine Optimization, our thoughts automatically go to Google. Seeing as it is the world’s search engine of choice it isn’t difficult to see why. The field is always shifting, and moves at quite a pace. It’s a full time job for us to keep up with the changes and incorporate them into our strategies.
Now Microsoft have entered the fray with Bing, and going after Google with a vengeance, what does this mean for SEO?
One the surface it doesn’t mean a great deal. Although very different beasts, Bing uses a similar algorithm to Google. Both systems are quite different, and will produce different results, the rules are much the same.
Both engines like quality linkage and good content. They both have sophisticated spam filters and won’t tolerate rubbish. In fact the MSNBot crawler is pretty much the same as the one used in Live Search. It has had a few upgrades as you would expect, but it is pretty much the same.
As the specific mechanics of search engines are a closely guarded secret, leaks and reverse engineering are the main tools of the optimizers. The release of Bing has divided the web community with one side saying that there are no fundamental changes to the way page rank is calculated, so no need to change the approach, and the other saying that the differences are such that they need much more investigation to understand properly.
So far the main differences have been seen with the presentation of search results. Specifically with the left side of the screen and the addition of categories. This just seems like an extension of your search at first glance, but digging deeper finds that Bing actually sorts results into these categories.
It also automatically removes duplicate returns from the search results. This is something I like the sound of, as each result is going to be a different resource and will save lots of time when searching. It should also give users confidence that each result is a genuine and discrete one, rather than different versions, or pages of the same site.
As new and as shiny as Bing may be, it only have a tiny amount of market share. Google is still the giant among men and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change very soon. So the question now becomes, ‘if Bing needs extra SEO strategies is the return on investment worth it?’
The answer is going to come down to how much extra work will be involved to optimize a site for both search engines. If it isn’t that much and all we need to do is add broader terms to compete on then it isn’t too much of an effort to factor Bing in to your strategy. If however there is more to it than that, until the market share increases significantly, I don’t think the extra effort is worth it just yet.
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