JitNik's Tech World

Right from its multi million dollar launch advertising budget to its controversial/edgy name, Bing has been making quite a bit of noise on the web. In fact it is really pushing the envelope on a lot of aspects of web search, including monetization. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that Bing in its own small way is beginning to have an impact on online search and access. Enough anyway to question whether it will have an impact on webmaster and SEO best practices.

The first and foremost reason why we need to consider this question is obviously traffic. Since its launch Bing has been gaining traction as a source of traffic for a variety of websites. Especially in the niches that it promotes its decision engine e.g. shopping, travel, health etc.

Once this obvious point is done with the real reasons of why it might have a bearing on site optimization comes through. It’s different approach to presenting content in the search result through categorization. Bing’s selling point at least the one that they blow their trumpet time and again is that it is a decision engine. Which makes the contextual relevance required in a search result far higher than say a Google’s SERP.

For instance, it is far important for an e-commerce site to be on the top searches in the shopping category than the all results one.

The whitepaper that MSN has for Webmasters clearing things out for SEO though doesn’t touch up on this aspect. It simply suggests that the bot and crawling it did as MSN search has not been changed much, and most SEO best practices remain the same for better indexing in Bing. However, like many in the field of optimization point out, this is just a list of on site or on page work while the impact of optimizing for Bing might probably lie outside of it.