Link Building for Bing vs. Google

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.