A Further Bing SEO Update

Just a quick one today following on from my look at how Bing could be ranking sites yesterday.

I have had comments here on the blog, on twitter and even by email looking for a little more proof that Bing is putting their main emphasis on domain age and target anchor percentage. For anyone who missed the post yesterday, target anchor percentage means the percentage of backlinks that are anchored with your target keyword.

Today I wanted to back up the evidence from yesterday with some more lovely figures I decided to use linkscape and the SEOmoz tool set to take an indepth look at the keyword “make money”. I chose this one due to the competition and the fact that most sites targeting this phrase are heavily optimised.

Below are the results and again I have circled the areas “I” think Bing are putting the most emphasis on for ranking purposes.

The two sites are:

Experienced People – Number 1 on Google for “make money”.

Making Online Money – Number 1 on Bing

Some Points To Note

1 – As you can see from the above table the Google site is far better optimised on page, more quality backlinks, more target anchor links and a far superior PageRank. This makes it easy to understand why Google ranks it so high but why does Bing not?

The only thing I can put this down to is the fact that the Bing Site has a more focused link profile in that it has a higher percentage of anchored backlinks. It also is an older domain slightly, on every test I have done the domains have always been older than those on Google.

2 – Bing are obviously not taking the amount and quality of backlinks or PageRank into consideration or their top “make money” site would not stand a chance. PageRank 2??

3 – Something I picked up on from both sites was that very little link juice passed through their target anchor links. This says to me that you don’t need your anchored links to be high quality in order to pass on relevance.

4 – In order to rank higher on Google you need to view SEO as a total package leaving no area under optimised. If you want top results on Google ,who have around 80% traffic share, you need to be systematically implementing SEO on and off page.

In my opinion from the evidence I have collected, Bing are putting a strong focus on domain age and target anchor link percentage. It won’t allow many spammers to get good rankings for competitive keywords but what it will do is create a lack of freshness among their results, something Google accomplish with ease.

Thanks

Tim