I’m currently seeing around 1.5% to as much as 4% of site traffic originating from the Bing organic results for a cross section of clients and my colleagues are reporting similar statistics. Bing has quickly gained some significance, overtaking AOL as a source of site traffic. So what are the ranking factors that are important to Bing?
For the lowdown from the horse’s mouth you need to pay a visit to the Bing Webmaster Central Help site where there is a ton of useful information. Rummage around and you will find their Guidelines for Successful Indexing which tell you that Bing likes well-formed, standards compliant HTML pages, among other things.
Here are a bunch of suggestions based partly on these notes, partly on my own observations and experience and partly on feedback from friends and colleagues. If you want to compare the Bing search results with those provided by the big G. this is a particularly useful tool: Bing vs Google Comparison.
- Domain Age. For me the jury is still out on this one but others are telling me that older domains appear to have an edge in Bing.
- Keywords in Domain Name. Use of keywords is always important but carry out a handful of Bing searches and you will see many sites returned in the top 10 that include those terms in their domain names.
- Onpage use of keywords. Appropriate use of keywords in page titles, meta descriptions, top level headings and page content is clearly important to Bing. Their guidelines state: ‘In the visible webpage text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your website‘. Keyword stuffing is a no-no, but I’ve seen some examples of severely stuffed page titles at the top of the Bing results.
- Backlinks and keywords. Backlinks are always important. Bing appears to give a lot of weight to links from sources which themselves have a lot of relevant inbound links. Also, the anchor text used in backlinks makes a significant contribution to a page ranking well in Bing for those terms.
- Content. Great content is important in order to rank well in Bing. Their guidelines tell us that in order to rank for a particular term it must be used in the page copy and not presented solely in images. Some have suggested that pages about very specific topics are tending to rank more highly.
- Page Size. The Bing guidelines tell us that an image free page should be less than 150KB in size.
- Standards Compliance. The Bing guidelines tell us that we need to ensure that pages are using only well formed markup. This suggests that Bing will tend to rank standards compliant pages more highly than those that don’t meet web standards. I haven’t carried out an extensive examination of whether the pages returned by Bing comply with web standards, but those I have looked at were littered with various markup errors so it would appear that strict compliance with web standards is not a requirement.
- Site Architecture. Bing reportedly likes a flat site hierarchy. However it doesn’t appear to be having any problems indexing and returning relevant deeper site pages to various long tail searches. The guidelines tell us: ‘each webpage should only be from one to three clicks away from the default webpage.‘
- URLs. The Bing guidelines tell us: ‘Keep your URLs simple and static. URLs that are complicated or that change frequently are difficult to index as link destinations.’ So make sure your URLs are all simple and user-friendly, ideally with some relevant keywords in them.
- Sitemap. The Bing guidelines recommend providing a good sitemap that can be crawled easily by MSNBOT. A site map creation tool is provided but to use these tools you must first authenticate your website.
All in all the recommendations are not that much different from those provided by the big G. The importance allocated to various ranking factors is clearly a little different from Google and its interesting to see that Bing explicitly refers to the W3C validation service to check markup, which is omitted from the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
The Bing guidelines warn against using some well known bad practices. Specifically:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Using hidden text and links
- Using link farms or other methods for generating backlinks
So its looking like sticking to some fundamental best practices, including verifying that markup complies with web standards, is the way to go if you want to be prominent in Bing. Good quality content on specific subjects with clear, reinforcing backlinks from authoritative sites should go a long way toward improving rankings in this search engine. It will be interesting to watch how the Bing share of the search market grows over the forthcoming months.
