Should I Do SEO for Bing?
by Kerry Dean on 10/15/2009 in SEO
It’s been a few months since Microsoft launched Bing.com, the world’s only decision engine. Has anyone heard how Bing.com is doing in terms of market share? Last week during SMX East, internet research firm Hitwise released a report that claimed Bing and Yahoo actually lost market share from August to September. After a few months of growth for Bing, I was very surprised by the findings:
- Bing, launched with great fanfare by Microsoft in June, saw its share of US searches fall from 9.48pc in August to 8.96pc last month, in spite of the $80m (£50m) advertising budget Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer allocated to its launch.
- Yahoo!, with whom Microsoft has entered a yet-to-begin search pact, also saw its market share slide, with the new Hitwise data showing a fall from 16.96pc in August to 16.38pc in September.
What about optimizing for Bing. Well, I agree with Aaron Wall from seobook.com (link):
Is Your Site Optimized For Bing?
“The thought of adopting different optimization strategies for different engines feels so antiquated now. Years ago, there used to be a lot of talk about how to optimize for the different engines. Some webmasters would go so far as to serve differently optimized pages to each major engine. In the past few years, SEO has been about all-Google, all the time, so the rule of thumb is to optimize for Google, and the rest pretty much takes care of itself. This advice still stands.”
Aaron’s right about Bing and you will likely hear this same conclusion from other SEOs. Furthermore, the only time you might hear anything different is if you are looking into very specific verticals of search, like local, mobile, image or video. But then again, I am hearing a lot of dissatisfaction with many of Bing’s features, specifically the search results. The logical question is: Why optimize for an inferior search engine, especially when it might cost you rankings on the engine that drives 71% of all searches?
Personally, I like the aesthetic feel of Bing. I love the simplified homepage (obviously, an idea taken from Google). I love the sidebar on the search results pages (a feature now also being used by Yahoo). I like how Bing displays image and video content. But overall, it is my opinion that Bing is suffering from antiquated crawl/index issues prevalent on msn.com and live.com. Their crawlers don’t seem to be as sophisticated, they don’t typically crawl/index as deep, and they don’t update their index as fast as Google does.
Finally, the SEO ranking factors are pretty much the same for Google and Bing: title tags, meta tags, H tags, tons of unique content, quality inbound links from related websites, etc… The only difference I can see is that some SEOs claim Bing is showing more love to domains that are older. In one of his videos, Matt Cutts says “Don’t worry about that very much” when it comes to domain age, but he also admits that, at times, historical data could be used in their ranking algorithm. Also, is domain age the only thing that people are noticing as a unique ranking factor? What about keywords in the domain. MSN has always loved that!
My experience leads me to believe that domain age is definitely a factor on both engines, especially for searches in hyper-competitive verticals. However, it seems that people who are trying to reverse engineer the Bing algorithm are finding that domain age is a big factor for Bing. Is it bigger in Bing? Well, according to some SEOS, it seems to be. As with most SEO advice, take it or leave it. [Note: While you can’t go back and register you domain in 1994, you can go and register your domain for 10+ years. While Matt Cutts says “don’t worry about that very much”, I say “DO IT ALREADY!”]
In conclusion, SEO is SEO. No matter what search engine you are using, go with the numbers. Make sure you are good with Google. If Google likes you, the chances are Bing will, too. And if you are really up for some blackhat stuff to test for Bing ranking factors, you could always set up sophisticated user-agent detection on your server. Serve one version of your site to Google and another version to Bing. That would give you the opportunity to keep your Google rankings, but you would also have the ability to test all sorts of site elements for Bing. But I don’t recommend doing that unless you are an SEO badass. Seriously. It’s called cloaking, and it could get you banned. And how!
Cheers!
Kerry Dean (yourseosucks.com)
Jonathan - Advanced Life Skills
Oct 15th, 2009
I don’t think anyone will ever take much away from google. They stay too far ahead of the curve.
Eric D. Greene
Oct 16th, 2009
I’m hesitant to say “ever” when it comes to technology…
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
Eric,
Once in a while you have to live on the edge.
Wayne
Oct 16th, 2009
I would imagine that Google will one day hit a point where they become more sluggish to respond to market changes and competitor innovations. They do a good job now, but will that always be the case?
I’m think about all those apps, like Wave and such that they keep coming up with. At what point does Google become victim of their own innovation and begin to lose traction because of how spread out they are?
I think they will eventually…or the alternative is that 90% of the human race works for and supports a Google app in some way.
Just thinking from the hip…Cheers!
Darrell
Oct 15th, 2009
I have used Bing a few times, but it really seems from the look, feel and results that its an attempt at being another Google search engine. Domain age is very important and I always take what Matt Cutts sez with some hesitation because he can only say so much without getting himself into trouble.
As an SEO guy, I follow along with G’s Webmaster guidelines etc. for my home based business and ranking in the SERP’S. The rest of the search engines will follow along. I don’t see that part changing anytime soon and Google will continue to dominate the search results.
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
Darrell,
The Google Webmaster Guidelines is a must read and a document everyone should follow.
Michael Aulia
Oct 15th, 2009
I’m not really good at SEO but I’ve been getting around 600 hundreds a day from Google alone, so I’m quite happy
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
Michael,
That’s pretty good traffic to get daily from Google.
Posts about SEO Rankings as of October 16, 2009 | Rankings.me
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Porter
Oct 15th, 2009
I submitted my site map to Bing and few other minor additions, but I’m not about to go out my way for it, not until it grows, and keeps growing. Google is still on top, and I don’t see it leaving the top any time soon.
HART (1-800-HART)
Oct 15th, 2009
Nice article Kerry.
It doesn’t surprise me at all about the declining market share of Bing. I just go there once every few days to see what type of background image they have – that’s it.
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
Hart,
Bing has made major strides, but what I don’t get is why was Windows Live so unpopular? Oh I know, it’s in the name and Bing is catchy.
Lennel
Oct 16th, 2009
“SEO is SEO. No matter what search engine you are using, go with the numbers. Make sure you are good with Google. If Google likes you, the chances are Bing will, too.” – True. Google has gone even more powerful than imagined. Sometimes I get to believe that SEO equals Google…or Google exists for SEO..or SEO exists because of Google..Whatever the case, you have a great article there, Kerry. Thank you.
File Horse
Oct 16th, 2009
also all agree with you, i don’t think anyone will ever take much away from google. great post!
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
We appreciate the comment!
Djolhan
Oct 16th, 2009
I just have to say, no to your question, for me, bing is death in his nest.
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
Death in his nest? I would love to hear commentary because I have no idea what you are talking about.
John
Oct 16th, 2009
If the numbers for Bing come up to about 25% or more, I might actually put some effort in to figuring out how they rank differently from Google. If its true that domain age matters a whole lot and Bing isn’t indexing very deeply, well then there’s not much I could do about ranking there that I wouldn’t already do for Google.
New content, new links: its a simple outlook but its pretty effective.
SEO Specialist
Oct 16th, 2009
hi, i have a question: does bing have a nofollow atribute like google?
So… if you do SEO for google, it will work with bing too?
PS: I have added this article to my social bookmarking site.
Frank J
Oct 16th, 2009
If you are an SEO specialist, I find that strange that you would ask such a question unless you are trying to get link juice from this site.
SEO Specialist
Oct 16th, 2009
i’m not a seo specialist.
And yes, i wanted to get a link from here (sorry) , but i’m curios if bing have something like nofollow atribute as google. I don’t know much about bing.
Frank J
Oct 17th, 2009
I would not worry about nofollow with Bing. If your pages are being indexed that’s what’s more important.
BunnygotBlog
Oct 16th, 2009
OK Guys,
I may be in over my head here but Bing seems to be faster then even Google.
Frank J
Oct 17th, 2009
Bunny,
I am not sure if there’s a difference in speed as the Google page always seems to load fast.
Mathdelane
Oct 17th, 2009
I’m not utterly obsessed with ranking on Bing. As long as it drive some traffic to my site, although meager, it really doesn’t matter.
Jade
Oct 21st, 2009
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results
Frank J
Oct 21st, 2009
Jade,
I have to say that Bing is pretty much following Google down the same path and I see both engines serving up information consistently.
SEO Wanna Be
Nov 4th, 2009
Hi your post is amazing, It’s incredible, I learned a lot about SEO and Man, this thing’s getting better and better as I learn more about internet marketing. Also as part of my ongoing mission to find the absolute best tools to make money, this is without a doubt at the top of my list. Everything happened so fast!