First thoughts on Bing and SEO

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was launched with little fanfare in Australia this week. Touted as the big M’s challenge to Google after years in the search wilderness, Bing claims to intuitively understand what people are seeking on the internet.

Microsoft cited study results indicating that an estimated 30 per cent of online searches are abandoned out of frustration and that searchers often fail to get what they seek on a first try.

Bing relies predominately on algorithms and key words to provide results for online searches but has infused some “semantic technology that deduces intended meanings of phrases”, according to Microsoft.

Having been live a few days now, we thought we take Bing for a run around the block and see how it stacks up.

Our first impressions of Bing are that its clean and easy to use, not dissimilar to Google in that regard.

The big difference is in the search results. Its immediately clear that Bing’s algorithm is very different to Google’s. Do the same search in Bing and Google and you can receive totally different results. We feel that Bing is placing greater emphasis on certain links.

A developer challenged me yesterday about whether our SEO system would work as well under Bing as it does for Google. Good question.

So today we have started running our optimised sites and keywords through Bing to see how they performed. The results were interesting to say the least. We had no problems in showing up on first page of Bing for all the tests we ran. In some cases we were higher than in Google, others a little lower. But in many cases they were different pages to the one’s we had optimised for Google. It seems some of our secondary SEO strategies work better on Bing.

Does Bing radically change the search engine optimisation challenge? At this stage we don’t think so, as long as you are being extremely thorough with your SEO. However if you think you can just get away with some basic SEO, you might not be found as easily on Bing.

Of course, the bigger question is whether Bing will get any real traction in the marketplace? Google an amazingly dominant search engine and is the default for most people. That’s going to be a hard habit to break.

Bing gives Microsoft “a leg up” on competitors but is more likely to lure users from Yahoo! because “Google is too much of a habit for everyone,” Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk said in a blog post.

We’ll keep an eye of the stats and let you know.