Some people wonder about the difference in the ranking of a
website on Google vs. other search engines, for instance Bing. As an investor,
you can get confused here. You paid for the SEO, and you were expecting your
website to rank in all of the search engines.
It would be worth mentioning here that good SEO is not about
ranking on one search engine only. Although Google is the top search engine,
there is quite an audience which doesn’t like using it. Most of them use Bing.
You surely don’t want to miss the marketing opportunity by ignoring that
relatively smaller, but actually quite big, audience.
One of the reasons we are talking about Google vs. Bing here
is that Google often goes through a lot of changes. It’s the frequent updates
which have totally reshaped Google from what it was few years ago.
Now, since Google is a globally recognized search engine
which is used more than other search engines, professionals ignore the
potentially powerful search engines like Bing. This is the mistake.
According to a research, Bing holds 21% of the search engine
market in US. While this figure may be smaller than Google which is 64%, it still
has the users who can turn out to be great customers if Bing is focused well.
With that said, we are going to discuss the difference
between link building for Google vs. Bing, and that how to focus search results
in both.
Consider link count
aggressively but be cautious
There is a difference in how both search engines value the
back links, i.e. Google focuses mainly on quality and Bing on quantity.
PageRank is one of the important ranking signals Google
uses. According to Google Search Console:
“PageRank is Google’s
opinion of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other
sites. (PageRank is an important signal, but it’s one of more than 200 that we
use to determine relevancy.) In general, a link from a site is regarded as a
vote for the quality of your site.”
While Bing has done fair amount of work to ensure that high
quality links are being ranked in its pages, it mainly focuses on quantity of
links.
“Links pointing to
your site help Bing discover new pages on your site. Traditionally, it is also
regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is
essentially telling Bing that they trust your content.”
With that said, you can target both search engines if you
work a bit more intensively to create high quality backlinks in more quantity.
Use social media
While the existence of links in social platforms doesn’t
hold much weightage when it comes to ranking in Google unless the links are
actually bringing genuine views, Bing actually encourages placement of links in
social platforms. The good news here is that Google doesn’t mind placing links
in social media sites as neither promotes nor demotes the sites doing this
practice. So you are pretty much free to add websites’ links in social media
sites only to gain better rank in Bing.
