SEO For Bing – What’s Different Than Google?

Recently at SMX Advanced London, I spoke about some differences between SEO tactics for Bing vs. Google. To begin with, it’s important to note that most of what works for Google works for Bing – good content, authoritative inbound links, clean HTML, appropriately-built meta data. If Google likes it, chances are very good that Bing likes it as well.

Where I found differences, however, was in the long tail – there are certain types of content that Google likes but that Bing seems either dismissive or unaware of.

Things Bing Doesn’t Like:

• Forums – Bing is less likely to find results in the content of forums
• Content Farms – Even post-Panda, Bing is harsher on results from “content farm” publishers
• Broad Matching – If you want to rank for a keyword in Bing, it better be verbatim
• Phone Numbers – Bing provides significantly fewer results for phone number queries

There’s more, of course. I’ve uploaded the slides from my presentation here: SEO for Google vs. Bing (must like Chitika on Facebook to download).

Why the differences? There’s a few theories, one of which is that Bing is more likely than Google to cut out what they consider non-authoritative. When Google provides ten pages of results for a phone number, it’s not likely that anything beyond the first page is what a user is looking for. The two engines appear to have a different philosophy: trust the 3rd-party Internet and let the users sort it out (Google), or try to improve the search experience by aggressively removing what you consider to be non-useful content (Bing).

Both philosophies are valid, and it will be interesting to see where user preference goes in the coming months and years.

All of these observations are based on a fairly large sample set of data across the Chitika ad network, so they should be quite representative.

Any tips or observations from our publishers? What tends to attract Bing traffic that Google overlooks, and what does Bing not pick up on that Google favors? Remember: Bing controls a lot of the market, and sends traffic that clicks on ads at a much higher rate.