What are the differences between Google SEO and Bing SEO?

[rball1]

I came across this question on why the poster's rankings in Bing/Yahoo were so much lower than his rankings in Google. One of the links responded with was a presentation Rand gave about the difference in ranking elements of Google and Bing.

My purpose for looking into this is to boost rankings in Bing to be more in line with my Google rankings. My takeaways from Rand's presentation were that Bing likes shorter URLs than Google and it's better to have more links from more root domains with more precise anchor text.

Unfortunately this presentation was given at last year's SMX Advanced and is almost a year old. Since then Microsoft has been accused of basically scraping the Google SERPs and Google unleashed at least two maybe three rabid Pandas. Needless to say the environment has changed.

So my question is for those people who are happy with how they rank in Bing: What SEO factors are you seeing make a bigger impact in Bing vs. how they impact your Google rankings?

[StalkerB]

I'm going to hijack your question a little bit, sorry, but I was wondering what sort of people are getting traffic through Bing to make it worthwhile?

I've been first in Bing and some local Yahoo sites and still get negligible traffic versus being anywhere on page 1 in Google.

Actually, scratch that. I guess US facing companies where Bing has a bigger share as opposed to my Europe facing operations

Anybody got the latest figures on search engine share by territory?

[MarieHaynes]

Interesting. I need to watch that presentation.  I'm wondering if the shorter url thing is significant.  My urls are long and I don't do well at all in BING.

[RyanPurkey]

I'd take a "Good for Google AND Bing" approach and focus on getting links from a more diverse set of root domains as that will hep rankings in both.  Shortening your URLs may help, but it's also going to require changing your site, redirection, canonization, and all the things that go with that. If you have any advertising data via Bing, that can also help you with some content creation that may do better there (in terms of conversion). Again, even on my sites that should be better tailored to the niche's Bing has been growing in, Google is delivering the lion's share of traffic, like 20 to 1.

[SteveOllington]

Ranking well on Bing and Yahoo has in the recent past brought us next to nothing... I know I'm still meant to try for all but I only really focus on Google now. Like you said Barry, in the UK pretty much everyone uses Google... yeah what are the latest figures? I know it was well over 90% a while ago.

[rball1]

Bing has gone from about 25% in December to 30% in March here in the States. Google is still on top but with Bing gaining as much as it is anything that helps there will bring incremental results... which is my reason for starting this discussion!

[SteveOllington]

Ah okay... I guess you never know what could happen... Microsoft are pretty wiley lol

Found this for the UK: http://theeword.co.uk/seo-manchester/google_retains_top_spot.html

Looks like it's still hovering around the 90% mark to the big G over here.

[rball1]

It's interesting to note that not all of the percentage points Google is losing are going to Bing and Yahoo. Hmm...

[sichristie]

I can speak for New Zealand. Google dominates 90% of SE traffic. The rest scrap it out after that.

[rball1]

Here's a little somethin' of what I'm lookin' for...

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-rankings-cheat-sheet/29847/

[b2bmarketer]

winner, winner, chicken dinner. Interesting article. Anyone have experience testing these? Bing/Yahoo can definitely be worth it to my sites & clients if the keywords are broad enough. I've also noticed how my Google & bing/yahoo results only have loose correlation. Interesting to see if I can boost bing w/o trashing G results