Bing’s SEO challenge
Chris Crum over at Web Pro News has been keeping an eye on the increasing likelihood of Bing becoming more competitive in the SEO game.
With Yahoo and Bing coming together later this year Bing is becoming the main rival to Google. Bing is the default search engine for the Opera browser and also Verizion’s Blackberry (in the good ol’ US of A). Hewlett–Packard computers will have Bing as the default search engine over the next 3 years.
And, as Nick and James pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Bing is in the start menu of Windows 7 and Vista and IE is the default browser of Windows, which, of course, has Bing as it’s search engine. So with 70% of computers being PCs, and therefore likely to be running Windows, they have potential to wrestle some market share from Google.
Bing is on the right track but it’s going up against Google which has become a brand and is even used in daily speech (‘Oh, yeah, I Googled it’). Google isn’t just a search engine anymore.
Moving onto the technical side of Bing, it’s webmaster tools allows you to see the types of links that are coming into the site and their value. Useful for SEO, if you can identify a particular sector/area where links are coming from.
But Bing has recently made some changes to their tool. They listened to users and implemented the non-crazy ideas.
I’ll give you a brief overview of the changes.
- Bing wants to now focus on three key areas with their webmaster tools: Crawl, Index, and Traffic.
- It will allow you to submit individual URLs to Bing that should be prioritized by their robots.
- You will be able to block cache links, block individual URLs, block whole folders of pages, or even block your entire website from appearing in SERPs.
Bing’s webmaster tools are now more comprehensive than Google’s and that will be attractive to SEO companies. Though will the general public care? They don’t hear about this kind of news; they just want to find the most relevant result from their search.
So, Bing has the potential but will it knock Google off the top-spot?
June 23rd, 2010
Nice article, Rob. It’s all interesting stuff, but how many people will just reset their default search engine in their browser back to Google?
It’s whether or not Bing’s search results are good enough for people to ‘vote with their feet’. I’ll be very interested indeed if this were to happen, though I suspect it’s unlikely, because Google is still a better search engine…
June 24th, 2010
Thanks for the article, it seems to me that Bing has been changing there algorithm…just thought I would mention it as this can bring up more relevant SERP’s.
June 25th, 2010
Hi - Thanks for reading and commenting. I agree with you that Bing’s results are improving, but I think it will take them a while to become better than Google.