Live Blogging: SEO for Google Vs. Bing

June 8th, 2010 Ryan Jones

SEO for Google vs Bing is about to start here at SMX. Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Sasi and Janet are in the house. Danny just opened with a terrible Sex and the city 2 joke, and now we’re being pitched to. Really, starting with a pitch? #smx #a1a (more spam shit).

Ok here goes. I’ll edit this down to only the crap that seems to matter. I’m leaving out all the basic stuff that would bore most people.

Sadly, Al Gore is not in the room.

Janet Driscoll Miller: Why should we worry about Bing? It’s going to be a 2 engine world soon. Heat maps show that people look at Google and Bing the same. Bing seems to out perform Google on Pages/Visit and Time on Site according to her metrics.

Big supports .xml sitemaps via the sitemaps.org protocol – however unlike Google Bing doesn’t accept video or news sitemaps. It does support sitemap indexes though.

Google has places for local listing, bing has something similar.It’s called bing local listing center but it doesn’t support this chrome browser I’m using.

She’s claiming that site links in Google and Bing only show on the first result, and Matt Cutts perked up. I think he noticed she’s wrong. Here’s an example query: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fail+pictures&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

In Bing, you can’t edit your site links like you can in Google.

Bing News: has no way to submit your site to their news search. You’ll have to email [email protected] with an RSS feed.

Oh Noes! Cash back is going away in July.

Bing has added a “share this” button right into search results for images (example: polar bears. I’m not sure how crazy I am about this. Who shares something before visiting it? Also, no link love provided – the “share this” feature gives you a Bing URL, not the URL of what you’re sharing.

Cutts got a good chuckle out of the fact that Bing video preview only works on Youtube and not on MSN video. Looks like Bing needs a helping of their own dog food. I hear it’s tasty. Here’s Matt’s Take on the session.

To disable document preview in Bing search results add < meta name =”msnbot”, content=”nopreview” >
Or you can add x-robots-tag:nopreview to your robots.txt file.

Danny is talking about making pages for different search engines. Some people admitted to doing this. It’s not something I’d like to admit in a room of SEO’s.

Rand has a slide up about bringing more science to SEO. I’m all for that,but how successful will that be in an era where roughly 50% of SEO’s don’t think that they need to know HTML. You can check out Rand’s slides here.

So far if I could sum up the Bing/Google strategy in one sentence it would be: Just make an awesome, findable site and don’t worry about the differences.

So glad Rand brought up correlation and causation, as this is where many misguided SEO beliefs come from. It’s also the focus of all those video questions I had answered last month.

Keyword Exact match domains have a very high correlation to top ranking in both Bing and Google. Is the domain that much of a factor? Or is it that an exact match domain can really only be about that topic. Also, achor text to a site like “failpictures.com” would probably just say “fail pictures” giving a substantial boost. (my example, not his… I typed this before he spit his out)

All in all, keywords in domains DO matter – as those of us in spammy activities have known for a while!

Interesting: Keywords in sub-domain have very low correlation to ranking in Bing, but much higher in Google. Factor, or related to the high volume of sub-domain spam out there?

Rand is talking about ALT attributes. Where’s Jill Whalen at? 🙂

Rand’s data shows .org has the highest correlation to rankings, and negative correlation to .edu. WTF? Here’s where correlation <> causation comes in – but I’m willing to bet several SEOs sitting in this room are currently registering .org domains. update: looks like this data is completely skewed by wikipedia since it’s a .org.

Rand said some more stuff about links and anchor text, but I missed it while I was hijacking Matt Cutts google buzz page and discussing shitty seos with Janet Miller on Twitter.

Cutts is speaking now.

Matt says Don’t chase search engines, chase the user experience – because that’s the goal of search engines; to chase search experiences. They just have different methodologies of doing so, but the goal is the same.

Matt says Bing shows Wikipedia more than Google – I didn’t know more than 100% was possible.

Sasi says don’t worry about “bing-like” or “google-like”, worry about “what does the user like?” Don’t do anything specific for search engines (I’m sensing a theme here) do it for the user.

Good question for Sasi: What will happen to yahoo site explorer? Sasi says at the end the SEO experience will be good – but no official details here.

What we DO know is that Bing & Yahoo rankings will be exactly the same – just like the old Google AOL deal.

Idea for next time: Bring a loud buzzer for when people speak.

Time’s up, I hope you found this review helpful. Leave me some comment love and check back later for other live blogs from the session – if I can find a power outlet.

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