Time for Bing?
June 26th, 2010
Those of us in the SEO world have been waiting around to see when and if Bing was going to really take off, be a major contender in the Search Engine game. Seems that time is upon us. Not only is Bing supposed to be merging with Yahoo! in the near future, powering results but Bing already provides the search results on Facebook. This combo, along with the fact that Bing -Yahoo! will provide about 35% of searches, means it needs to be considered when optimizing your site.
When it comes to Google Vs. Bing, it seems that on page efforts may be taking a back seat in both SEs to things like link building. Link building needs to consist of more than just a lot of links from one site, but need to concentrate to obtaining good links from lots of different sites. This will mean a small shift for some in strategy, but hopefully you are already diversifying your link building so as not to rely on one source.
We can all guess as to which elements of SEO will win out, or we can take a look at what the analytics tell us. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org has a great post up that walks you through the analytics of the whole thing. Pretty interesting – it’s gonna be interesting to see which elements are essentially the same, and who weighs which elements of SEO more heavily than the other.
Another question I put to you is what will this do in the wake of the MayDay update? What will happen to the long tail? Will the “exact match domain” matter as much as is being purported? “Exact match domain” refers to domains that are an exact match to your most relevant key phrases. We’ll have to see how analytics play out for a bit since the update. What this should mean is that your most relevant long tail phrase, if you used it in your url, should continue to matter, and in Bing – it will matter greatly.
While Google will still take over 65 percent of the market share, it is important to note that there is still a fairly large chunk (35%) to be claimed by the Yahoo!/Bing search engine. We will always optimize to make sure our clients are getting the most ROI, and I don’t see Bing changing that enough to warrant changing our best practices, however, I do think we need to pay attention to Bing and be prepared to make changes as needed.
