SEO for Bing?

[GregorySavanton]

That is not the truth. There are lots of other places from which you can get traffic. The problem is that you need an individual approach for each traffic source, and it takes time and effort to learn to drive traffic from each source.

There was a historic bias towards getting traffic from the major search engines because the same tactics could be employed to drive traffic from them.

Google decided to change their assessment process to discount the value of sites that they think are manipulating their algorithms. That means traffic tactics that once worked for all the search engines don't work for Google, and using those tactics may be disadvantageous IF YOU WANT TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE.

If you aim at getting Google traffic, your "approved Google" tactics will do nothing to discourage traffic from most other sources - but they will also put you at the mercy of Google. Many people who were making money a couple of years ago have been hit in the wallet. Having found out the folly of relying on Google traffic, they are exploring other traffic sources.

It is becoming harder and harder to get to the top of Google search. The salient fact is that their search results don't appear to find sites of better quality, and they are still in many cases favouring large and established sites full of the same old drivel and adverts. In other words, there's not much new stuff showing in Google search - just sites moving up the rankings as the B&W creatures cut out the sites they do not like.

It is getting so hard to please Google that the effort of looking at other ways to drive traffic is becoming more and more worthwhile. That must be why people are doing it ...

I didn't want to say that using Yahoo or Bing is bad. I tried to express my own opinion in which I consider that Google is better in comparison with other search engines and that's all.

[crabfoot]

I didn't want to say that using Yahoo or Bing is bad. I tried to express my own opinion in which I consider that Google is better in comparison with other search engines and that's all.

Don't take the comments personally. Here are some truths:

Google got to where it is by buying out all their significant competitors by around 2007. Yahoo and Bing remain because they were the only competing SEs Google couldn't afford to buy.

Around 2006/2007 there was a webmasters group action in the US against Google, protesting that Google was not giving new sites much chance in the SERPs, and was instead favouring older established sites, whatever the quality of the info on them. The judge found that the webmasters' case was valid, and instructed Google to do something about the problem, and make it easier for new sites to go forward. What they agreed with the judge was confidential.
What the world saw was that it became a lot easier to set up a site and make money from it for a few years after that.
In many cases sites exploited the blindness of the spiders - they served poor content intended to drive visitors into clicking on ads and used feeds to fill the sites with low quality content. And the web filled up with poor quality sites.

A rational conclusion, looking at what has happened, is that there was a set of time limits agreed with that judge. Google has implemented their updates to cut out a lot of the poor quality sites which they themselves allowed to prosper for a while. And now, since the Panda and Penguin updates, we are back to the pre-2007 situation, where G is favouring established sites in the SERPs, loving sites with lots of pages, pics and video, and ignoring small sites which are unattractive, even if they have really good information. It only looks like G search is getting better because they made their own results poor for so many years.

Google maintains its position as the leading search engine by spending money to make itself the default search engine in most of the web browsers available. They pay computer suppliers to supply machines where the IE is doctored to use Google by default, and Chrome is pre-installed as an alternative. They fund Mozilla, which is independent, but supplies Firefox with Google search as the default. It is very hard for competitors to fight that tactic - Google will spend over $10 billion dollars this year to promote their search in these and other ways.

The other search engines in the past lacked the Google vision of how to monetize free search, which is why they sold out to Google when they got an offer. Now Google are showing their business acumen by buying up other sources of traffic, like YouTube, to try and control traffic streams directly.

Google's turnover is massive - they turn over more cash than big multinationals that actually make physical products, like Unilever, or nations, like Croatia. The hassle is that they are now so big that they think they can rule the web - but the quality of their search will not improve unless they can see a profit from making improvements. And the search quality is no better, in my eyes, than it was ten years ago.

Google has shown a callous approach when it cleaned up its act with the Panda and Penguin updates - it cut down sites that people depended on for a living, and forced them back into day jobs.

Perhaps those sites did deserve to be dropped down the SERPs. The point is that those people did not realise they were depending on Google. Now that the situation has been made clear, the obvious conclusion is that people should be advised to reduce their dependency on Google traffic.

Google - they give things away for free, but they are not a charity. And they are now so big, they could apply to be the 52nd US state ...

[Kay]

According to Search Engine Land, Bing "quietly updated" its webmaster guidelines yesterday to include a warning of demotion or de-listing for keyword stuffing.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-web...tuffing-184825

The only surprising thing about this piece of "news" is that Bing didn't do it years ago.

While I was there, I found it interesting to also have a look at Bing's guidelines to remind myself of what they say they do want. No great surprises there. However, I noticed that they recommend you build your content around keyword research.

Build based on keyword research – shows you what users are actually looking for

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/w...lines-30fba23a

This surprised me a bit, although I don't know how long that guideline has been there. Much of what I've seen reported in the SEO communities over the last few months consists of cries of despair that keyword research is dead. Despite that, the SEO crowd continue to look for useful ways to benefit from keyword research and have been trying to create effective new tool kits. The withdrawal of the AdWords Keyword Research Tool in August 2013 left a big gap for many, and even though it was replaced by Planner, a lot of SEOs considered Planner to be inadequate for their purposes.

I used to be a big fan of keyword research - I was even a fully paid-up WordTracker member for years. However, I don't do much at all these days and certainly not in the same ways as I used to. How about you? Are you still doing keyword research? Have you found any effective ways of doing it? Any useful tools?

[crabfoot]

According to Search Engine Land, Bing "quietly updated" its webmaster guidelines yesterday to include a warning of demotion or de-listing for keyword stuffing.

The only surprising thing about this piece of "news" is that Bing didn't do it years ago.

This might be a reaction to a recent trend. There are still people building very simple aff sites targeted at YahBing traffic, because you can still get old-style very low content sites to rank on YahBing.
Recently, those people offering expensive coaching on "how to drive traffic from anywhere but G" have been advocating the building of such sites to their clients, for the purpose of giving them something to practice with.

Please read that sentence until it makes sense, I can't see a way to express the concept neatly.

Consequently, it is possible that YahBing is experiencing a small explosion of low-content sites, as people have become aware that it can still be worth the effort to create something easy to build.


And while I'm here - I didn't finish this sentence yesterday -

Google - they give things away for free, but they are not a charity. And they are now so big, they could apply to be the 52nd US state ...

but if they did apply, they would have to explain why they were salting away a lot of the profits offshore, to avoid paying tax.

[Nidec]

My sites rank better on Bing and Yahoo than Google but the vast bulk of traffic still comes from G.

[Johnybravo]

Genuinely, I don't think so for search engine like bing has enough grip in most areas to go after it particularly. If you are going to go after search visitors, search engines should still be the concern with Yahoo/ Bing visitors being an extra reward, rather than a primary concentrate of your time and effort.