Is Bing worth investigating

[donahueg]

I don't know much about Bing. I have my plate full with google Is there a good description anywhere about how to utilize it? How to make money with it? I don't hear a lot of people taking about it.

Donahue Vanderhider

[Tim Buchalka]

Hi Donague,

We continue to test with Bing, and it does seem to be delivering better traffic. Of course it's no where in the realm of Google (or even Yahoo) but it's improving all the time.

It's certainly not something you should ignore, I always tell people that if a search engine is the default on many new computers (like msn/bing used to be/is with Internet Explorer) then you should certainly try and keep up where time permits.

Generally speaking, in my experience if you rank well with Google, you tend to rank well with Bing, but it seems to take them a lot longer to figure that out.

Obviously there are exceptions to this but thats what we are finding at present.

I've seen a few products that helped you rank incredible well for MSN but not sure if they work for Bing.

Cheers


Tim

I don't know much about Bing. I have my plate full with google Is there a good description anywhere about how to utilize it? How to make money with it? I don't hear a lot of people taking about it.

Donahue Vanderhider

[Mike Taylor]

Warning: this is just my observation:
Bing does seem to be quite sensitive to the tags you use and to 'keywords' meta-data. Since Google doesn't look at keywords anymore many people seem to ignore them, but Bing does look at them. I have some pages, optimized for other keywords, that show up in Bing for terms that are only in the 'keywords' data. I guess that being ranked for the optimized phrase helps get the follow-on rankings as well.

[sneddo]

Bing also like directory links much more then any other search engine.

If you have good onpage seo the you are 1/3rd of the way to awesome ranks in bing. for me it delivers better traffic than yahoo.

So yeah work with bing and enjoy the fact sooo many others ignore it!!

[Kerry]

Hi there,
I don't know why or how but it's definitely worth using Bing and yahoo as well as Google.
I track my keywords in Rank Tracker in Market Samurai and I've noticed that all three give completely different results. Of the top 25 keywords I track, several are in a position over 200 for one or two of Google, Yahoo and Bing but none are in even the top 500 for all three. I know my business partner submitted the sitemap to all three at the same time.
I've also noticed that time is not a factor necessarily. For example for "Thunderbird sync" one of my videos is at position 14 in Google and not even indexed in Bing or Yahoo yet the same keyword on our main site is at position 36 in Bing and 91 in Google even though Google indexed it on the 1st March and Bing didn't index it till the 21st March.
If anyone has any good explanations or tips on all this I'd love to hear them.
thanks,
Kerry

[Anthony Buchalka]

The other thing to keep in mind with Bing & Yahoo is their recently announced plans to merge.

How everything will pan out is still unclear but certainly worth keeping an eye on as they are trying to give Google a run for it's money.

[brysonmilk]

Bing seems to be very sensitive to the labels you use and the keywords, meta-data. Since Google does not appear for keywords in more people seem to ignore them, but Bing has an eye on them. I have some pages that are optimised for keywords that appear in Bing expression data only for keywords. I guess that is placed in the expression optimised to help you follow the ranking as well.

[macgizmoguy]

It's August 2010 and Yahoo is now now using (and modifying) Bing's core index in North America. So I'd suspect the traffic differences between B/Y in our server logs should narrow and be less inconsistent from site to site. The drawback now I fear - is going to be much more black or white. With BingHoo they're either going to love or hate your On-Page and backlink profile - or not. Ugh, a 'Two-Legged' table of Search traffic to balance on...

Combined, B/Y is now roughly a THIRD of the Search market. I'm hoping the SEO community really dives in to decode what does and doesn't work with BingHoo - with the same intensity and hell-bent energy they've applied to deciphering Google. The age old, generalization "..if you rank well in Google, you'll probably rank well in Bing..." just doesn't cut it anymore! Guessing and hoping and assuming is no way to build a sustainable biz or revenue model.

P.S. I concur - MSNBot is still agonizingly S.......l........oooooooooooo.....w to pick up new sites and pages. Very frustrating: How can you assess the impact of on and off-page changes if there's such a lag in seeing the effect?!? And yes, keep using those Keywords tags lightly and intelligently. There's still alot of spiders, indexers, look-ups and bots that pick up on them and incorporate them into your page/sites 'vocabulary' and overall theme.

[infoesource]

I too get some traffic from Bing but as most others, I get the vast majority of traffic from Google and then Yahoo.

[Mike Taylor]

Bing/Yahoo are upping the ante on social signals. The two service account for a small but significant amount of traffic, and they seem to be paying a lot of attention to user's and friends' likes. Google is countering the move by pulling more info from social sources.

Check out yesterday's post by Michelle McPherson: Michelle MacPhearson

If her analysis is correct, there is a significant opportunity for us to exploit. Things like 'like-to-view' (aka 'reveal') iFramed fanpages are becoming not only common but required.

I've been testing several available fanpage options. So far the best I've found is WP Fan Pro. It is a WP blog with all the hooks built in to hook into your FB page. It makes it dead simple to drop your (unadorned) aweber script in to put an opt-in directly in front of peoples' noses...

I have tried a few others - one that only allows 2 pages - and installation of each is pretty much the same level off effort.

A common characteristic of all of them is the 'reveal' page strategy. I have had a couple of these deployed for a few weeks and am getting consistent 'likes' and opt-ins.