Do you use a different tactic to optimize for Bing?
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Google is king, but it seems as though there is a significant source of traffic and revenue from Bing. What is the preferred strategy? Optimize for Google and hope it filters to Bing? An obvious concern would be that if we change tactics to please Bing, we could stand to lose our rankings with Google. Any opinions/thoughts/feedback/suggestions would be appreciated.
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Hi! I see that a good part of your reply is based off of this October 2010 blog post at http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/seo-for-bing-versus-google/. I'd love to see any more recent information that you might have, as well as personal experience.
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Honestly, just by doing my stuff I do for Google, all my words rank super high in Bing. It just happens there. They seem to also stick much better in Bing, very little movement once I am at the top.
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Google is not king...they are taking over the world....
Obviously, Bing's algorithm is different from Google's because when the search term is the same but the set of results is different, a difference in the algorithm is the obvious answer. Because google is dominating, the real question is what is difference between the two algorithms and is the difference large enough that it makes it mandatory to reoptimize a site for Bing. THE ANSWER IS NO....unless you have ten things to do and three of them optimize for bing and google, then prioritize those.
Regardless, tests by SEO engineers all around the world have come to a few conclusions about what causes these differences in search engine results....here they are.....
Get Cozy with Microsoft Ad center. They wont admit it but all of our urls, over 50, got enhanced results on Bing when we started doing more in adcenter........believe it.
Backlinks Are Less Important in Bing Comparisons between backlinks (how many links point to a web page) have shown that, all being equal, the top ten search engine results in Bing have fewer backlinks than in Google.
PageRank Matters Less in BingMicrosoft hates google....lets face it.. Page Rank is Google’s algorithm that places a number relative to a web page’s search engine results strength, have shown that PageRank2 (or even PR1) sites regularly appear in the top ten results on Bing, whilst this almost never happens on competitive phrases in Google. (But then it does make sense that a Google-patented page-ranking method would carry less weight with Microsoft’s Bing.)
Inbound Anchor Text Matters More in BingA factor common to both major search engines, anchor text (the text inside the
<a></a><a>tags; i.e., </a><a>This is the anchor text</a>) from quality sources seems to be a large factor with Bing; more so than with Google. A strange phenomenon here seems to be that Bing puts more emphasis on anchor text links that have the linking phrase in the title of the page.Microsoft SEO ToolkitThe Internet information Services SEO tool kit, say that five times fast, is a solid tool kit released by Microsoft that helps you improve your site from an SEO point of view, and therefore, by logic improves its Bing ranking. It includes all the normal stuff: site analysis, robots.txt exclusion, sitemaps, etc.
Pretty good recent article on it can be found here: http://www.brafton.com/blog/seo-tips-to-boost-bing-rankings-as-microsoft-fearlessly-battles-google-800459707
Hope this helps......Ciao!
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I don't use any different tactics to optimize for Bing. Great targeted content that is easily accessible and has good quality signals (links and social) will rank well on both engines. Bing appears to be a bit more picky on use of the canonical tag and with how clean your sitemap is. Google appears to be a bit more lenient on these fronts, probably due to having a more sophisticated engine.
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