SEO for Bing - a discussion with Bing's Duane Forrester

[BenFox]

I don't suppose anyone could point me in the direction of any posts written specifically about SEO for Bing?

[greenleaves]

@ martinibuster,

I'm not on the bing team. But I make quite good coin from a lot of sites, which by my own admission, should be deindexed; sites you would complain about, possibly even report.

The problem here really boils down to:

Targeted Niche sites
Vs
Large Brands

Google used to LOVE targeted niche sites. I could create a blog called brooktroutfishing.net or something, and get it ranking in no time. All I needed was a couple of articles of low quality unique content ($10 domain + $20 for 2000 words of unique content), a few links and blam! Adsence money would roll in. I'd maybe add a 'news' section with auto posted, scrapped content, so it would seem 'fresh'.

Now Google has wised up to this. Now, targeted niche sites are a lot less effective (not that they don't work). Large, 'authority' sites are now preferred.

So what do I have to do now to game the 'authority' preference? Simple. I buy an expiring domain. I then make it on a generic topic, like fishing. And I have sections for each type of fishing:

whateverdomain.tld/brooktroutfishing

And blam! I play into the 'large authority site' preference Google now has.

The sad fact of the matter is; SERPs will always have low quality results as long as it is profitable to game the algorithms.

The only thing SEs can do is constantly 'tweak' what works, so that those who don't stay up to date (that is 99.9999% of all SEOs) fail. But they will never be able to fully get all the SERPs to be 'highly relevant'

And things will only get worse. Right now, most people who have money weren't born with computers. But wait until my generation grows old. We will ALL spend our money online. And there will be more reason than ever for people to want to game the SERPs.

[NixRenewbie]

when I try and visit a work related site

Eh, why would you do that? ;-)

[thirteen]

Large, 'authority' sites are now preferred.

So what do I have to do now to game the 'authority' preference? Simple. I buy an expiring domain.

Did I understand this correctly?

The "Age of a Domain" has gained importance after Panda as a ranking signal for Google and Bing? The older the domain, the higher the brand signal?

[Planet13]

The "Age of a Domain" has gained importance after Panda as a ranking signal for Google and Bing? The older the domain, the higher the brand signal?

I have seen proof and "disproof" of this in my very narrow niche.

One site that has been around for years leapfrogged a lot of other sites that had MUCH larger link profiles.

On the other side of the coin, my site that is relatively new (October of 2009) was able to leapfrog a lot of the competition too, mostly due to new inbound links.

I think that age of domain has maybe been turned up a bit, and backlink importance has turned down a bit, but I don't know exactly how. Lots of sites still rank top 3 with crummy backlinks.

[Planet13]

Bing returns an article on ArticleBase that appears to be rewritten from the eHow article. It features many of the same tips, in the exact same order, only rewritten with poorer English.

Aha! Now I know why I DON'T rank well in bing!

[martinibuster]

The thing with older and newer domains/sites could be a reflection of inbound links and Bing's (in)ability to integrate that data into a new set of rankings. A good argument could be made that Bing is unwilling to trust a site with a low amount of links, more imo than a hypothesis that the age of the site is playing a role. Based on my observations with new and older sites with few and more links I am confident it has more to do with the amount of links than it does with the age of a domain/site.

I believe Bing's inability to deal with new and newly linked sites as well as low-link sites says something about their overall algorithm. It points to what their algo is looking for, at least in links.

[Staffa]

Bingbot on the site mentioned above, complete results for August.

Nr. of visits : 179
Robots.txt fetched : 179
Pages crawled . ONE (home page) as Bingbot

and one page already mentioned above using the fake UA.

This performance earns Bing this month's award for "Excellence in crawling"

BTW, does anyone know if Mr Forrester is on holiday ? This thread being a"discussion with .." it is conspicuously quiet on his side of the table

[1script]

So, this is a three months old SEO - related thread and links have just been brought up once by martinibuster and that mentioning generated no replies? If this were a Google - related thread, the word links would have been used at least three times in every reply.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around this: bingdude talked about every little detail (even meta keywords for cry sake) yet he did not mention links which Google puts at #1, #2 and #3 in their Design and content guidelines and the entire section of their "SEO Starter Guide" titled "Promote your website in the right ways" is only about backlinks (their term, they don't call it just links)

So, would anyone see this as an indication that links (internal and external) are not as prevalent in Bing's algo as they are in Google's? Or is this just an attempt at avoiding mentioning the elephant in the room?

[thirteen]

Time for update. After 6+ months, I have some good news.

I have one site that was SEO for Google. Before Panda, it was on Google search result page 1. After Panda, it got knocked down to page 5.

I took this site and redesigned it for Bing/Yahoo after Panda. I threw out Google guidelines and follow Bing/Yahoo's guidelines instead for this site. I switched from concentrating on making it search engine friendly for Google to making it search engine friendly for Bing/Yahoo instead.

Before Panda, it was on Bing/Yahoo search result page 2. After I redesign the site to accommodate Bing/Yahoo instead of Google, it is now on Bing/Yahoo search result page 1.

In summary, SEO efforts for Bing/Yahoo still works small sites if your site got knocked down because Panda algorithm emphasizes Big Brands over small sites.

This is result for one one site, too small a sample to be definitive. Like to hear from others.

[nomis5]

I do slightly better, position wise, in Bing compared to Google. I don't do any special SEO for Bing though, I'm not sure that there are any known specific ways to SEO for Bing. Any ideas anyone?

Bing do have a propensity for big brands in my niche, though but they show it in a different way. Site links for the big brands knock anyone not in number one position way down the page. A real pain in the neck.