Bing is the “new” search engine from Microsoft that you are currently seeing all over the television and Internet. Having been live for several days now, many web masters such as ourselves have had time to analyze and compare some of the search results that Bing is providing to see if webmasters have an easier or harder time with ranking their websites in the Bing search engine.

First off it should be pointed out that Bing does not like to be called a “search engine”. they are trying to coin a new phrase which is “decision engine”. Their own advertising suggests that a decision engine such as Bing can help it’s users make better decisions about all types things from medical suggestions to restaurants and shopping. This is because they are drilling deaper into the search results then Google and allowing thier visitors to filer their searches into greater detail.

An example is if you are searching for a local restaurant you can choose to filter your results by reviews for that restaurant that Bing finds on the web, by price, by parking, by menu, and so on. This greater level of detail in the search results, Microsoft hopes, will have users switching their search to Bing for greater flexibility and detail.

This is all good news so far for the average web surfer. Now the burning question in the SEO community is how will Bing choose to rank and index sites? How easy or difficult will it be to obtain front page rankings? What criteria is Bing using so that I can optimize my websites to rank well in Bing?

These are all the burning questions of the day and after some time spent doing some research here is our initial reactions to Bing, and things that webmasters should be aware of…

Bing Decision Engine Results Page

First of Bing does not revolutionize the way that it is indexing and ranking websites. In fact based on the research done it appears that the Bing results are not at all that different from the Microsoft Live search results you would have seen previously. Obviously the amount of data being displayed for your site is greater on Bing, such as the pop up display for all results that a user can view displaying some of the top inner links of each site listed as well as a large snippet of info about the websites to help searchers decide which of the results is most relevant for their search. Bing at it’s core seems to be a very spruced up version of Microsoft Live in it’s current fashion.

Microsoft Live was always a bit quicker to index brand new websites in our opinion then Google or Yahoo. Google has improved in this area greatly over the last couple of years and fast indexing in Google is probably on par with the old Microsoft Live at this point.

MSN does not rely on the DMOZ crutch as Google still continues to do. For this we give Bing a point over Google.

Bing seems to weight the title tag of the web pages heavier than Google does. The title tag is easily controlled by webmasters so for someone looking to optimize a website, they will probably favor Bing over Google on this point. For the Internet surfer this could be a bad thing compared to Google because you are are at the hands of the webmaster as far as relevance of the title tag to your particular search needs.

Bing puts even more importance on domain age then Google does. This is an important point whether you are a “search engine” or a “decision engine”. The reason you would want to put more weight on the age of a domain is beacuse obviously an older domain is more stable and therefore less likely to be spam. This is a plus for the surfer. If older website are being preferred then you are less likely to get unrelated spammy sites in your search results. The downside here is that while Google may produce more instances of spam in it’s search results, it is also going to be providing much fresher content then Bing. Many cases have been reported of using generic terms for news related items and getting search results from Bing that are dated 2007 or older versus Google producing current 2009 results for the same key term. In this respect one must give Google the upper hand for trying harder to provide fresh content to it’s users.

Back links appear to have a greater weight with Bing then with Google. This is good news for webmasters as well. The hard working webmaster is busy writing fresh content and promoting their website across the Ethernet of the Internet diligently. This is how they are 0obtaining more back links to their sites which in turn means that the search results should be better than a website with only a few links from DMOZ and other directoriest that Google is still using a crutch. As long as Bing is attempting to determine that the number of links going to each site is also some relevant white hat sources then this is good for both the webmaster and the surfer. As long as Google continues to regard DMOZ as a high authority source of oobtaining it’s indexing data, we will continue to speak out against the wisdom of it’s ways. DMOZ is a corrupt and outdated human edited directory. The editors list sites in their results and often take bribes to list sites because webmasters know that Google looks favorably upon their directory. This is bad for webmasters, bad for users, and speaks very poorly on the decisions that Google is continuing to make.

Overall we thing that Bing offers many new features that Google is lacking. As far as search results we still give Google the advantage because the domain age issue will provide very poor search results for anyone looking for the most up to date content. While Google may let some spam through the cracks, this is a vital piece of the search engine’s purpose and therefore we award Google the upper hand in search results.

Bing may say that they don’t care because they are prodding “decision engine” results and not search engine results. Well sometimes people are just “searching” the web and not looking to make a “decision” so we hope that they remove this narrow focus in the near future. I don’t think any search engine optimization firms want to become decision engine specialists

we hope you found our initial review of the Bing decision engine helpful. we will continue to report on as we gather more data about how to better optimize your sites for Bing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 2:21 PM and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.