Right from its multi million dollar launch advertising budget to its controversial/edgy name, Bing has been making quite a bit of noise on the web. In fact it is really pushing the envelope on a lot of aspects of web search, including monetization. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that Bing in its own small way is beginning to have an impact on online search and access. Enough anyway to question whether it will have an impact on webmaster and SEO best practices.
The first and foremost reason why we need to consider this question is obviously traffic. Since its launch Bing has been gaining traction as a source of traffic for a variety of websites. Especially in the niches that it promotes its decision engine e.g. shopping, travel, health etc.
Once this obvious point is done with the real reasons of why it might have a bearing on site optimization comes through. It’s different approach to presenting content in the search result through categorization. Bing’s selling point at least the one that they blow their trumpet time and again is that it is a decision engine. Which makes the contextual relevance required in a search result far higher than say a Google’s SERP.
For instance, it is far important for an e-commerce site to be on the top searches in the shopping category than the all results one.
The whitepaper that MSN has for Webmasters clearing things out for SEO though doesn’t touch up on this aspect. It simply suggests that the bot and crawling it did as MSN search has not been changed much, and most SEO best practices remain the same for better indexing in Bing. However, like many in the field of optimization point out, this is just a list of on site or on page work while the impact of optimizing for Bing might probably lie outside of it.
Any SEO experts reading this? Do place your views on this matter. Technically it doesn’t affect Indian SEO’s much, considering the decision aspect of Bing is not available in India. However, considering India has been one of the major outsourcing hubs for technical SEO work and most Indian SEO firms also have a lot of US and European clients, this is something the larger SEO community in India should discuss and have an opinion on.
So feel free to place your views.
Bing is making an impression it seems.
Bing bing bing! I hope it does not need to concentrate on bing marketing, and SEO for it in an another way. I do not see much differences in google and bing. It might affect some strategies and techniques you use. But I would like to be on a 50% track so that Google and bing both love me.
I saw a post online that explains the comparison between this bing and google. Think might be useful. http://lawfirmandattorney-internet-marketing.com/seo-for-bing/
I think you could get more info if you search in google for the keywords SEO for Bing.
Bing has some spotlight features like instant answers, deep links and bing maps. and I personally like the image search result
But for SEO people out there who are looking to rank their sites in Bing search, Google and Bing are inverse. If you have optimized your site in Google search then its little difficult to get it ranked in Bing. You have choose highest priority between google and bing, ask your clients (and I am sure they will choose Google)
Thanks..
I hate to be “that guy” but I have to disagree with Joshi. It’s not a one or the other scenario. Both search engines want good content. Both search engines want good meta information. Both search engines want clean and easy to read code. Both search engines want to see sites being updates. The big difference comes in linking strategies. Bing doesn’t see them as all that relevant while Google LOVES it. The basic principles are still the same in that we work with clients to make sure they are providing the best site possible and working to continually improve what’s provided.
Among the three I actually sort of agree more with @BubblesonaRiver personally… in my mind it works like this…
Considering the categorization element of Bing (dunno how important it is) if we do a tad more optimization for Bing it will result in better optimization even for other search engines as well.