In 2009 Microsoft invested millions of dollars in order to improve it’s search engine engineering and marketing. The result of these improvements was presented with the name of Bing. The results have been growing and currently Bing, former Live Search, is ranked as the number #2 global search engine on the web outranking Yahoo! and consistently tryiing to gain on Google’s supremacy.
A while ago I wrote an article, based on my personal experience and a case study made by Chitika to check which search engine brings better Click Through Rate to my blog and while Google annihilates it’s competitors regarding traffic it was the worse performer when it came to CTR, followed by Yahoo! in second place and Bing with 50% more clicks on ads than Google.
The results made me curious and this lead me to find several aspects concerning search engine optimization for different search engines. Although the basic SEO techniques are the same (backlinks, title, url, headings, bolds, etc) there are some differences on how Bing and Google interpret the same results. One way to prove this using Bingle a search engine that shows Bing and Google results side by side. You might find the first results are pretty much the same no matter what the search but from position #5 and down you’ll start noticing different results on the search engines as the following image shows:
Since Bing’s search algorithm is not for public display, some SEO experts tested several search queries in order to find possible patterns to interpret what Bing weights and doesn’t and came across the following conclusions:
Bing Search ranking factors
The following list show’s several points compared to Google seo optimization techniques
- Inbound links anchor text. Bing gives more weight than Google to this so think well when linking internally. Although the quality of these inbound links can provide a good value to the page you are linking to, Bing attributes more weight to the anchor text of this link rather than the quality of the page the link is coming from.
- Domain age and site authority are more important on Bing than on Google.
- Bing seems to be more Flash SEO friendly.
- On-page optimization matters. Bing seems to give more weight to on-page factors than Google does.
- Number of backlinks is less important to Bing. It’s still in the gray zone if the nofollow attribute is or not a ranking factor
- Fresh content weights less. Bing prefers older results to new fresh content
For now it is too early to say which factors are of primary importance with Bing. But the fact that their search results are relevant means that their algorithm is really precise. Well, maybe the relevant results in Bing are due to the fact that web masters were taken by surprise and they haven’t had the time to optimize for Bing. As a result, the content is authentic, there are no SEO gimmicks and artificial pumping. We’ll see if this will stay so in the future, when web masters learn how to optimize for Bing as well!
Bing Optimization – How to optimize your website for Bing
Like Google, Bing has it’s Webmaster Tools an excelent way to help improve your results and track your website performance. Bing also has several articles that might help you:
- Guidelines for successful indexing
- Search Engine Optimization for Bing although very useful, doesn’t add much to what I’ve said previously.
If you want good results keep creating good, original content, apply basic seo practices and techniques and after having your base ready start improving for specific search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo but keep in mind, users come before search engines.
I’m interested in what you are thinking so consider leaving a comment 
