Hello SEO'ers, Is there anyone who can provide a brief but relatively inclusive overview of what Bing is, how it works, and how one can optimize pages for inclusion in Bing? Is it worth focusing on Bing right now, or will Google always be "It"? Thanks!
Bing is so new that it is not likely that anyone has reverse engineered their algo yet. However, I can tell you that Bing is pretty much MS Live with a facelift and some very minor tweeks... So take what you used to do for Live and it should still apply for the most part. And yes... Google will always be "it" at least for now. Bing has nothing that is going to steal significant marketshare from Google. I'll bet in 6 months to a year, they will be back down at the same levels Live was before Bing came out... or even lower.
So basically it's just a marketing ploy... I'm new to IM in general and any experimenting I've done was purely Google-based. Thanks for the info - I guess I'll keep concentrating my education on Google. igaryok1, for the same reasons Canonical stated, or others?
IMO Microsoft has never been an innovator. They have always been a marketing company. All the way back to DOS/MSDOS, they bought that product and then marketed it to IBM to put on the PC. For any market they want to enter, they have always bought their way in rather than start from scratch developing something innovative. I knew about 9 months before Bing was announced that MS was "rebranding" Live. That was the word their search execs used when they told us about it. We meet w/ our search account execs, search account mgrs, search analysts, etc. from MS (and Yahoo!, Google, Ask) every quarter for a quarterly business review, and I "hear things". They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make "Bing" a brand in hopes that that will get them more search volume. And ultimately it comes down to the results... and I think there's are over-hyped and under delivered. I think it's funny actually. How many TV ads have you seen for Google.com? hmmm I don't believe I've ever seen one. Perhaps there have been a few for a superbowl or two... but I don't see them on a regular basis. Yahoo!, Ask, and now Bing over the years have had big ad campaigns, mostly to no avail. Personally, I think Google still has the most relevant results of all the engines. I can find almost anything I want in 1 or 2 searches there. But that's just me...
Agreed... But when you have billions of dollars behind you, I guess you can do that. I was just "hoping for more" from them. It'd be nice if Microsoft would actually deliver something good. It'd be equally as nice if some anonymous benefactor got together a really good team of programmers and created a Linux team solely for the purpose of threatening Windows. But that's another conversation for another day. Also agreed. I've used Live literally 3-4 times in the past year or two for personal searches, and that was only because I couldn't find some really obscure topic on Google. If it can't be found on Google, it can't be found.
Webmasters and geeks made Google what they are. These days more and more webmasters and geeks are getting fed up with Google and would like to see more search competition. Bing is just good enough that they might take a significant bit of the search share. There are some features that beat Google, and the results are not too bad on a lot of searches. As to the OP's question, I am seeing anomolies that suggest that Bing is putting a lot of weight on outbound links - just the opposite of what you would see in Google. I have, for instance, searched for a specific (low ranking) domain by name and the results are all sites linking to it, with the name in the anchor.
willybfriendly, Hopefully Google will get some competition. I always like to see competition in any market - it makes every (surviving) company better. And thanks for the tip.
Yeah, Bing is the facelifted version of Live. (Don't listen to MicroSoft, whatever they say about Bing, Truth is too hard to bear ).. Secondly, use the standard SEO Techniques like putting daily content and building quality links, you will automatically be listed on top of the list at BING. Bing is a search engine so treat it like that...
Thanks for the tips. Guess it's never in anyone's best interest to look for shortcuts is it? I'm just wondering what would make a site a page 1 result on Google and a Page 3 result on Live/Bing or vice-versa. Anyone noticing significant differences in their pages between Bing and Google for the same keywords?
in my opinion, bing seems like a meta search engine. domain name is a big factor. some sites appear 3 times at first page.