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Ever since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing search Engine, the SEO community has been put back to work with analysis of its algorithm and verifying search patterns. This is quite logical as Bing is expected to be ‘BIG’ and eat off a share from Google. This is also not the first time a new heavy weight player comes to the ring, so its unclear if Bing will start uprooting Google’s strong user base. Still, Bing is very much different from its older competitors and this is what makes it quite different.

Is Bing Really That Different?

Relevance of the search results makes the job hard for SEO experts. Bing’s results are very much different than Google’s yet very much relevant too. This can be easily done by searching the same term on both engines(or you may try Bingle) and the result will be very much different.

What we all want to know is, what is Bing’s algorithm. Ofcourse it is clearly different than that of Google since the search results are different, but how different is it? Is the difference so vast that we need to conduct different optimization techniques to optimize a site for Bing?

Bing’s algorithm is obviously not publicly available, so we don’t now what exactly has to be done in order to optimize a site for Bing. By now, many SEO experts have done many forms of analysis of Bing’s search results to find out how different it is from Google and what exactly matters.

Some say Bing is nothing but Live search in a new avatar, others say Live is quite different from Bing. There is no doubt that Bing’s search results are much more relevant than Live search results.

Based on numerous analysis done by many SEO experts, here are some factors, which are to be considered when optimizing a site for Bing :

• Backlinks hold less weightage. On comparing Bing’s results with Google for a particular search query, it is clear that backlinks don’t count as much for Bing than they do for Google.
• It is unclear if Bing respects the nofollow attribute.
• Anchor text of backlinks matters more. The quality of backlinks may not matter but its anchor text surely matters. Since the same(anchor text i.e.) also matters highly for Google, here’s a similarity that can help in simultaneously optimizing for both.
• Since Bing doesn’t care about the quantity of backlinks, link spamming will do no Good. Neither will it help for Google due to its Advanced algorithm.
• Onpage factors matter highly with Bing. For Google its more of an off-page thing, but when optimizing for Bing, the Onpage factors matter the most.
• Authority and Age is important to Bing. If this seems to be true, then its bad news for small sites and blogs which would be easily overpowered by authoritative sites for competitive search terms.
• Domain age is again something that matters. Infact, Bing pays more weightage to Age than Google.
• PR matters less. Pagerank is Google’s exclusive calculation and is not relevant to Bing, so it won’t be surprising to see a PR1 page outdoing a PR6 page for a particular search query.
• Fresh and updated content matters less. This can be because Bing cant index pages as fast as Google so this idea of fresh content and frequent updates has been dropped in their algorithm.
• Bing seems to be more Flash-friendly. Optimizing a page for Google with flash content is more or less of a nightmare for SEOs, this seems to be different in Bing. Its unsure as of now but many analysts say, Bing understands Flash better than Google. This if true, would be great news for the site which largely deploy Flash content.

The above factors are more or less accurate, though we can’t be sure. The fact that search results are relevant, means that Bing is precise, this could even be that SEOs were not prepared and haven’t optimized for Bing as of yet. Lets wait and watch how manipulated the search results become once people start optimizing their pages for Bing.

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