Bingo for Bing?

Bing.com slipped into the search engine world earlier this month, and have since been the cause of a lot of discussion. While their launch was almost without fanfare on their behalf, Microsoft’s newest entry in the search arena is beginning to show a bit of budget for unique advertising like fast-forwarding ads during online shows and other campaigns, suggesting that they might be here to stay.

Compete reports that Bing have been drawing “trial” searchers, and have quickly made a 9% penetration into the market, though haven’t claimed much ground from Yahoo! or Google. Microsoft AdCenter have answered some questions on how Bing will affect paid search results, and are expecting a rise in ad impressions. It’ll be interesting to see how Bing fares in the long run and whether advertisers using Microsoft will see many changes in CPC and CTR.

Search commentators have been going bingo on stories about bing, particularly Mashable, who even set up a fairly inconclusive blind taste test for search engines. The results were quite matched across all of the search engines and only backed up the sentiment that seems familiar across all blogs: Bing might not yet beat Google, but for once Microsoft may have developed a decent search engine.

SEO experts are now faced with the task of deciding what method of optimisation will suit Bing. www.seoforbing.co.uk jumped in quick with a domain purchase, but they don’t seem to know much more than when to seize a good opportunity. The Bing Webmasters document doesn’t have many tips past ensuring your sitemap is updated and site structure is well-formed. Thanks, Bing!

Optimising your site for Bing shouldn’t have too may unique practices, though time will tell. At this stage, the most important thing is to make sure your robots.txt allows Bing access. Bing is using the updated (we hope) MSNBot. Add this to your robots.txt file and set any Allow / Disallow rules you like. We’ve seen sites in the past that block certain bots for one reason or another, but now is definitely the time to let MSNBot access your page.

We’ll let you know our findings as more info comes in on how to optimise for Bing, though it doesn’t seem like typical SEO practices shouldn’t apply. All our clients are already achieving good results in Bing, so our practices work! :)

2 Comments to “Bingo for Bing?”

1. Michael Kitt says:

   July 3, 2009 at 7:21 am

   Thanks for the link and you are correct we are struggling to get definitive answers as to whether Optimistion for Bing will differ greatly. At the moment Bing seems to be a platform waiting to happen. It will change and when it does we will try to detail as much as we can about it.

   Reply
2. Danny Ahm says:

   July 8, 2009 at 2:12 pm

   Check out this site for testing Bing Vs Google search results: http://bing-vs-google.com/

   Very interesting!

   Reply

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