With all the news of Yahoo starting to show Bing organic search results in the US and the assumption it will roll-out here in the UK and Europe after the US test runs, does this mean the sites have to change their SEO strategy to take account of this or suffer?
Well lets get a reality check first and look at the Hitwise UK report for week ending 22nd May 2010:
Google.co.uk (87.76%) and Google.com (3.90%) still account for 9 out of every 10 search queries in the UK.
Even if Bing (3%) combined with yahoo UK (2.57%) and Yahoo.com (0.37%), they would only still only account for ½ of a search out of every 10 search queries in the UK. The figures are a it more impressive for the US, but Google still dominates.
Having said that, we all know online is a numbers game, an the more people who visit your site the better (server capacity permitting), so it makes sense to optimise for Bing in those areas that don’t effect Google ranking and that you may not have considered yet. Here are two tips that will get your site better ranking in Bing while not affecting Google rank:
- Bing likes sites to be text heavy, as does Google, but the difference is Bing might mark down sites with under 300 words, so make sure you have 300+!
- Who would believe it, but Out-bound links from your site are a Bing factor (not to Google), so be aware of who you are linking to and what that anchor text is, and try to make the link to a site/page relevant to your page/site.
But basically, a well SEO’d site will be good for all search engines. However, if Bing/Yahoo combined does end up getting a significant market share and uses markedly different ranking factors than Google, there will come a day when sites will be producing different pages to attract the different Search engines.
Tags: SEO
