Bing To Complicate The SEO Game?

Unless you haven’t paid attention to the world of search engines for months, you have probably heard of Microsoft Bing. Microsoft’s latest attempt to finally challenge Google in the search engine game. And by that, it is destined to complicate the game which we call search engine optimization. When Bing and Yahoo! join in the upcoming months, they are going to become the sole main challenger to Google, and if you are a marketer who makes a living out of search engine optimization, you are going to have to figure out how to show up on the first page of Bing for fairly generic terms. You can still dominate the long-tail market but getting ranked for highly competitive terms can be a challenge.

Danny Sullivan put it best when he talked about the differences between Google’s and Bing’s algorithms:

You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing

You may not see too many differences in results as far as highly competitive terms are concerned, but there are major differences for those keywords in the middle of the spectrum. Google does pay more attention to links whereas Bing pays more attention to content and tags. Both search engines still highly value having the exact keyword in a URL. But that’s never going to change.

Is Bing worth going after? I am not so sure. With the field of social media exploding the way it is, you are better off focusing on a long-term approach than something as fleeting as the Bing’s rankings. The best strategy to have is to figure out the common areas between Bing and Google algorithm and try to optimize in a way that strikes the right balance for both engines. But I have to choose two places to drive traffic to my website, they’d be Twitter and Google. Let’s not forget about Facebook either.

Bing is certainly a capable search engine and a decent move by Microsoft to finally get it right in the world of search engines. But this whole algorithm game is what’s wrong with the search engine industry. As much as I want to believe that companies are trying to offer the best search results to their readers, it seems as though they go out of their way to make their SERPs much different to prove they are superior to others. Judging the quality of websites indexed by Google or Bing is not that easy to do. There is no size fits all when it comes to websites. So this is a never ending game. You may find Bing to be an absolute beast of an engine that provides you with the most relevant results, but someone else may think the same way about Google results. That’s why we need personalized search where we get to choose what’s important to us.

We have made incredible improvements in the field of semantic search. It’s time for an innovative company to stand up and offer a search engine that learns from your searching behavior and optimizes your results based on that. Some folks don’t feel to comfortable with behavioral search, but I personally wouldn’t mind if my search results were more relevant. It’s not to say that Google and Microsoft are not working on these technologies, but the sooner these companies stop the algorithm games, the better off we are. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Why would anyone want to provide you with the most relevant results when there is more money to be earned the way the search engines are now. Cynical? Maybe. But we have been here before.