Tag Archives: Bing

Bing SEO Ranking Factors 2013 Study By SearchMetrics (do they really matter?)

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Article by Barry Schwarts via Search Engine Land

Searchmetrics has released their SEO ranking factors for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, today. Similar to their Google ranking factors, Searchmetrics analyzed 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 websites appearing in the top 30 search results and looked at how various factors correlated with rankings.

searchmetrics-bing-ranking-factors

The top five key findings were:

(1) Top brands rank higher on Bing, as they do in Google.

(2) Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings on Bing

(3) Social signals closely linked to higher rankings

(4) Quality content is important for search rankings

(5) On page technical factors are a must have

Here is a chart showing the Bing ranking factors by importance:

Bing v Google rank correlation chart_Jul13

The interesting part also is that when Searchmetrics compared the first page of search results on Bing and Google, they showed that 24.7% of the URLs listed were the same and 37.3% of the domains were the same. This clearly shows there is a difference in the results between Google and Bing.

Feature Forward: Enhanced Search Query Report Offers Even More Specific Options

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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It would appear that Bing (Microsoft) has been taking notes. The following was released today from Bings Nishant Gupta

Updates from your feedback. One of these updates is an enhanced Search Query Report.  Currently in development, the new report offers an additional set of options to help you drill further into your campaign’s search data.  One of our most popular tools, campaign managers use it to:

1) Identify opportunities for new keywords and adjust your bids to maximize ROI

For example, if the Search Query Report shows your broad match keywords, golf clubs, is attracting clicks from search queries for: golf clubs sales and junior golf clubs.  You should add those two terms to your keyword list as exact match and bid appropriately to generate more click volume.

2) Control search traffic engaging with your campaigns

Also if the Search Query Report shows your broad match keyword, golf clubs, is attracting clicks from the search query: joining country clubs, but that term isn’t converting well on your web site, you could:

  • Use a broad match modifier to emphasize that your business is selling golf clubs: Add a “+” sign immediately in front of the word golf.  The modified keyword: +golf clubs will engage with search traffic that has the word golf in the query.  Also, you could consider adding joining country clubs to your negative keyword list to specifically block this traffic.

You can learn more about these two optimization techniques at  Bing Ads Cure Keywords Caught in Bad Romance

Over the next few months we’ll be working to improve the options available to you in this report—specifically, options that give you greater control over your data and the insights you can gleam from it.

For example, we will provide stop words and additional characters in the search query column of the enhanced report. The addition of stop words will give you access a more detailed level of search terms data, with insight from which you can then use to better optimize for a wider variety of specific search terms.

The following are some examples of stop words and additional characters that Bing Ads is working to include into the Search Query Report.  I’ve also added an example of how this information can be useful in optimizing your campaign.

Search Query_Example of Stop Words and CharactersBenefits of this enhancement can be illustrated by following example:

Play GolfCurrently the data for the search queries: how to play golf andwhere to play golf are both summarized under play golf in the search term column of the report. If you are teaching golf, you are much more interested in the first search query, but with the current report it is difficult to effectively monitor and manage those two search terms individually.  The enhanced Search Query Report will separate those two terms and their KPIs to enable golf teachers to apply specific optimization tactics to each of those two terms.

Giving you more granularity and insight on the Search Query Report is part of our continuing efforts to enhance Bing Ads’ performance.  We will keep you updated on the availability of this enhancement via this Community Site.

Bing posted Webmaster Guidelines. I don’t see any suprises, they are what we expect in Google as well:

04 Monday Feb 2013

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These guidelines cover a broad range of topics and are intended to help your content be found and indexed within Bing.  These guidelines will not cover every instance, nor provide prescriptive actions specific to every website.  For more information, you should read our self-help documents and follow the Bing Webmaster Blog.  Inside Bing Webmaster Tools account, you will find SEO Reports and our SEO Analyzer tool for on-demand scanning of individual pages.  Both resources will offer basic guidance around what SEO work can be applied to a given website.  Beyond these features and sources, you may wish to consider seeking advice from a third party expert.

CONTENT

Content is what Bing seeks.  By providing clear, deep, easy to find content on your website, we are more likely to index and show your content in search results.  Websites that are thin on content, showing mostly ads, or otherwise redirect visitors away from themselves to other sites quickly tend to not rank well.  Your content should be easy to navigate to, rich enough to engage the visitor and provide them the information they seek and as fresh as possible.  In many cases, content produced today will still be relevant years from now.  In some cases, however, content produced today will go out of date quickly.

LINKS

Links help Bing find new content and establish a vote of confidence between websites.  The site linking to your content is essentially telling us they trust your content.  Bing wants to see links grow organically, and abuses to this such as buying links or participating in link schemes (link farms, etc.) lead to the value of such links being deprecated. Excessive link manipulation can lead to your site being delisted.

SOCIAL

Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results.  The most obvious part it plays is via influence.  If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals.  These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

INDEXATION

Being indexed is the first step to developing traffic from Bing.  The main pathways to being indexed are:

  • Links to your content help Bing find it, which can lead us to index your content
  • Use of features within Bing Webmaster Tools such as Submit URL and Sitemap Upload are also ways to ensure we are aware of your content

Managing how Bingbot crawls your content can be done using the Crawl Control feature inside Bing Webmaster Tools.  This feature allows you to control when, and at what pace, Bingbot crawls your website.  Webmasters are encouraged to allow Bingbot to crawl quickly and deeply to ensure we find and index as much content as possible.