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Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

Bing Talks About its Link-Building Policy

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By · December 25, 2009 · 84 Comments

It’s easy for businesses to get caught up in Google’s expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

I’m obviously talking about Yahoo and Bing, but Yahoo’s share is declining, while Bing’s is gaining. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway.

Do you take Bing into account when optimizing your site? Comment here.

Rick DeJarnette We don’t hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing’s policy, does not differ too much from advice that Google would give you. It is, however, still always nice to see how they feel, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

What Not To Do

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

3. Using hidden links in your pages

4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web

5. Linking out to known web spam sites

"When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction," says DeJarnette. "If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

What To Do

DeJarnette also shared some tips for getting more quality links. Following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently

2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they’re aware of your site/content

3. Publish concise, informative press releases online

4. Publish expert articles to online article directories

5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site’s content when applicable

6. Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)

7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

8. Launch a blog/forum on your site

9. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
  
10. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don’t have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.


Related Articles:

> What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

> Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

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There are 84 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. Thanx, but for me this reads like the instructions for google optimization. What exactly are the differences when doing linkbuilding for bing? I would have been happy if that would have been a little exposed…

  2. Guest
    Reply

    Once again we have a search engine that is overdoing the importance of links. Whatever happened to good old content? And all this silliness with having Tweets, Digs, Blogs, etc. I’m not sure what the Search Engine ‘gurus’ think a business or information site webmaster does, but it isn’t sitting in front of a computer fooling with a bunch of idiotic social networking sites or blogging incessantly – nor should it be – they need to tend to business. The Search Engines need to look to their requirements of what constitutes a good site. It isn’t the number of links, it isn’t how many blogs or social networking sites you are on it is CONTENT.

    Google search has become meaningless and Bing holds promise if they don’t try to follow in Googles footsteps. For heaven sake lets put the value of a website where it belongs. Usability, information, etc. All the things that make a viewer want to visit, look around, shop, buy, gather reference material or whatever. Viewers could give a hoot how many darn links a site has.

    • I agree that your webmaster doesn’t sit infront of a computer fooling around with a bunch of “idiotic social networking sites or blogging incessantly” nor should he/she, or anyone else for that matter.

      But search engine have to be able to find your site, and how are they going to do that? In bound links. I do think content is important, but if you can’t find that content, it doesn’t mean a thing really.

      Social networks and blogs are just a new metric for sharing content, as well as creating links, and in the case of a blog, creating content for those search engines to find.

      I don’t know, to me, it just makes sense.

      Maybe this will help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

    • mat
      Reply

      I agree, too much credibility is placed on those who evidently have too much time on their hands and can afford to mess about with the likes of facebook, twitter and countless others.

      The search engines know about the sites available (if you have submitted your url to them) and i really wish they would lose their obsession with links. “Content is king” google keep saying, but then sit back and count links.

      A search engine that disregarded or devalued all links and concentrated more on the content and substance of a site would rapidly get a serious slice of the search market i think.

  3. I am also in the SEO Business and its true that we should not link on the spam sites..this is a great treat for most of the SEOptimizers..

  4. Guest
    Reply

    Link is important. After all, with billions of documents in the index, there will be a large number of documents that are relevant to each query. Since it is notoriously difficult for machines to actually undertand the document content in order to rank between the many documents that match, using static score measures such as computing value of in-links is important.

  5. There was no mention in your article specifically about reciprocal links. Assuming that reciprocal links are from web sites of similar subject and content matter, does the fact that the links are reciprocal diminish the value of the link?

    • In item 4 it does mention doing link-exchanges could get your site reviewed by the staff:

      4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web

      i.e. reciprocal linking.

      Just an fyi.

      • Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
        Actually that’s not true reciprocal linking. Recip links are straight links from one site to another.

  6. how can be google top please give us tips

  7. link building is one of the greatest weapon but for high pr websites.but for msn/bing is google pr depends.

  8. tom
    Reply

    I hope Bing doesn’t penalize me for this comment! lol thanks for the reminders on good inbound linking practices.

  9. I have for the fist time been attempting to write articles and press releases.

    Your Do’s and Don’ts about how to get the best from Bing has been very useful to me. I have often found pages on our website do well with Google and Yahoo but not with Bing/MSN. I never really knew what Bing wanted exactly to get my website up the rankings along with my competitors.

    Thanks to your article I do now. Once again thank you for your valuable information.

  10. Guest
    Reply

    I think bing should get the bugs out of thier search engine before telling us what hoops we have to jump through to optimize. my site is one of a growing many flaged for malware that is not there, therefore i have been removed entirely from the bing search engine. Seems funny that google and yahoo index my site every week and have not gave me any such warnings! My host, google and yahoo must all be wrong and bing right?

    • Guest
      Reply

      So what are the bugs?

  11. Those expecting to have to do something different for Bing are fooling themselves. At the end of the day, use common sense in your link building and you will start to see results across the board.

  12. Doug
    Reply

    Its all a big scam to get money from you. Google and other search engines has built this fear into you that if your web site doesn’t rank high and show on their first page of a search result you won’t be found. BS!
    I find it fascinating that people get so caught up about this and throw money at Marketing firms and link Gurus to make them rank high on search result pages. LAUGHABLE. You’ll spend a lot of money and will only get minimal to no gain and to keep up with this pathetic idea. As long as the Search Engine companies continue to change there algorithms you will be screwed. You’ll be forever riding that endless page rank roller coaster. Bottom line if you sell something tangible make sure its available and sell it cheap.

  13. i submitted my web site to bing about twenty times and still got no sense from them. so what i ended up doing was sending all my twittter traffic to the smgdesign.net website and got no 1 on google no 1 on yahoo and no 1 bing it might of backed off a bit now but forget about seo just use twitter it,s free anyway from stugod

  14. I take Bing into account when optimizing my website because Google, Yahoo, Bing are all major search engines, they send traffic. Google is today the most important search engine, i like it very much but things may change.

  15. It appears as if they left the door wide open for malicious SEOs to get their competitors a SPAM rating.

    It looks as if anyone can screw their competitor by doing any of these 3:

    1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

    2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

    4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web

    That’s just ridiculous.

  16. Totally agree with point number 3 of What to Do, “Publish concise, informative press releases online”. This can be one of the best link building tools to help boost your rankings if used properly.

  17. I’ve spent a lot of money on so-called “tools” to get more traffic to my site only to cancel later because of poor results. However, by writing relevant content articles, commenting on related forums, adding relevant links, and constantly checking for broken links I have seen a constant increase in visitors each month. I agree, sometimes the old methods are the best, you can’t cut corners!

  18. Sites submitted to bing over a month ago are still waiting
    to be indexed even after jumping through bing’s hoops of
    webmaster meta code being added to the header, site map,
    robots txt, back links, etc. There is a thread in bing’s
    webmaster forum over 12 pages long of people asking why
    their site’s haven’t been indexed yet, the host has promised
    to look in on the thread now and then after having promised
    to help people posting there, too little too late. Another
    scam is bing adwords, all 5 cents when you submit keywords,
    one day of hits, then nothing, go back in and they’ve all
    jumped to a dollar, same scam as google, you need a grand a
    month to advertise your site if it covers multiple subjects.

  19. Guest
    Reply

    Bings claims of the complexity of their algorythm is bull. Their algorythm throws hopeless results and is based entirely on keyword density, page titles and url.

    I believe they have delibereately produced a cut-price search engine which throws results quite diferent to google. The novelty of using Bing willwear off when people reaslize it is substandard

    • Guest
      Reply

      Sounds like you are a MS hater. I use Bing and it is great. This from a long time Google user

  20. Guest
    Reply

    You hear all this talk about linking basically everywhere and it seems to me everyone has lost focus in regards to the #1 priority.

    The Internet is about offering a solution to people’s search queries and requirements when they are searching online. Quality, well researched and original content should be every webmasters #1 focal point. Once you get this formula right, then you can claim you are an authority within your chosen field making it easier to obtain high quality relevant back links.

    Article marketing is the best form of acquiring quality back links considering you are marketing content that is an extension of your main website.

  21. how should i and what is the best first thing common to do. how to incress the traffic of my site?

    • Stupidscript
      Reply

      1) Write excellent text for your website articles, all related to each other in some way
      2) Add some more relevant, excellent articles that you have written
      3) Write more excellent articles relevant to the others, and put them on your website
      4) Continue writing excellent articles to put online, on your website

      Take a SHORT nap.

      5) Write lots more excellent website articles
      6) Take some time to write some excellent articles for your website
      7) Every day, add a new excellent article to your website
      8) Consider writing a few excellent articles for your website

      Eat a little something.

      9) Write another bunch of excellent articles and put them on your website
      10) Finally, add an excellent article to those already on your website

      Sleep for a few hours, then start at #1, again.

      Please note that the writing needs to be truly excellent for the best results. Have someone who really knows about writing in the language you are using check your articles before you put them on your website, to be sure they are really excellent … and that they use the language properly. I’m not trying to be insulting … that’s a real problem.

  22. Hi there:

    I think link building does help but sometimes it is hard to find links relative to your topic but I think linking with sites not related you are still getting your site known to people who may be shopping for something-else and find your site through your link building.

    My site http://www.heavenpeturns.com has different links from other sites not related so pet owners will be able to find me in other words broadening my connections in to other topics. Any type of linking I think is good and better than not doing anything to let people know you are out there with a quality product for them
    Noma
    http://www.heavenpeturns.com

  23. Baffled
    Reply

    Wat a waste of time….

    BING is no better than ie5.5 or ie6 and guess microsoft still make a browser that is a pain in the back side, so why would their search engine be any better

    Microsoft thinks cause we are Microsoft lets just do what we want and stuff everybody

    well, i have tested Bing, and in sites that are over a hundred pages, moist good solid content and at least two years old, and guess what no matter what keywords, not bing serps…..all three i tried are 1-3 in Google

    BING IS RUBBISH

    if they want to succeed and rival Google, how about start like everyone else and do some market research and get there products compatible and usable first!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    and while your at it go have lunch with some designers and make your browsers compatible

    if open source products with volunteers can get it right, why can’t one of the biggest corportions in the world??????????????????????

    • Well, i also used to think the same, till the time i found myself ranking for one long tail keyword, the story goes thus, i was ranking no.1 in google for the same keyword and came to no.3 in bing, to my surprise i found targeted traffic being send in volumes by bing much more than what google was sending me and those traffic was converting like hell, guys i was shocked to say the least, since then i am concentrating on bing too, may be it is specific to the niche that i m working on, whatever it is just helping me!

    • Guest
      Reply

      It would appear to me your lack of knowledge in Microsoft’s products has you frustrated. It’s sad to see people like you posting, uneducated I’m sure.

      Have a good day sir.

  24. Hey Chris,

    I’m using Bing for a ‘corporate,’ ‘company,’ ‘affiliate’ landing page and have been for the past four months. And, I’m getting pretty good response. As you know, Google bans such 1-page sites based on their new ‘original content’ rules.

    Consequently, I haven’t really had the need to understand Bing’s rules. But, I always kind of assumed that they would somehow draw closer to Google’s desire for quality.

    Your article is particularly timely for me. I’ve taken this 1-page site and converted it into a WordPress blog; and I’ve started building content and links to this new site. Plus, I think I have it fairly well SEO’d. The funny thing is, I’m beginning to think that it’s more optimized for Google PPC than Bing.

    My domain is the same, and I’m still using Bing. But, I just re-started yesterday. I’ll give it a few days to see how I’m doing on CPC.

    Great article. Thanks!

    Rick

  25. I definitely consider Bing, of course I look at Google first as it is used more widely and will therefore bring more traffic. I optimize/pay attention to Google, Bing and Yahoo. Like mentioned at the end of the article, any savvy SEO should be aware of the list of do’s and don’ts.

    In response to the post “Linkbuilding Headache”. CONTENT is important as are QUALITY Backlinks. I have seen sites with fewer backlinks above sites with thousands, so it is not all about backlinks. Use the do’s and don’ts here, and you will be on your way, and yes, if you want your site to compete overall, you better build links as well. Don’t forget about any one piece or you will be doomed.

  26. As far as Google’s algorithm is concerned, it gives a lot of weight on backlinks or I must say, quality backlinks from relevant webpages.
    Algorithms of all search engines are quite similar in terms of on page and off page optimization. Website content, meta tags, title, relevancy, relevant backlinks from relevant pages etc.. I’ve observed and learnt from my experience that when you optimize you site for one search engine, some how it gets optimisez for other search engines as well.
    You can refer to Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines available in PDF format here. Its their official guide. Try making some more backlinks with your preferred keywords as anchor text.

  27. One of the most outstanding stuff about Bing is that it easily index your website. For just a couple of days it easily send a spider to your website and crawl it. Not compare to Yahoo it would take a months or even a year before it can index your website. I was just thinking if Bing have the same similarity on Google algorithm. Quality backlinks and fresh content.

  28. Michael Bay
    Reply

    I much prefer ViaMichelin for mapping and Geocoding services. The accuracy of ViaMichelin business and the coverage is far greater than Google and Bing (formerly Multimap)

  29. Nick Wood
    Reply

    Dont you just hate it when companies use Google for the SEO ! Legally they are not allowed to say this and this is cheating. That is why you pay for advertising !

    Maybe they should stick to search engines and get rid of the mapping and other crazy stuff they try. People only use these additional services our of convenience and not because they are any good cos there not.

    A good web developer should never have to use Google to succedd, what has the world come to when people feel they have to depend on one brand and one with not a good ethical or privacy record !

    • kes
      Reply

      I am fed up with Google dictating how SEO is conducted for search,every other day google comes out with yet another time consuming reason for you to change your seo tactics,does google’s big boss’s think we have nothing better to do all day than keep changing our clients coding, keywords alt tags, picture capture,page load time,now im getting bored why cant they just keep it simple,we have to try to make a living out of this very hard job as it is without all the rest of this nonsence.
      Google said some time ago that their algarithms are programed to find relevent content for search that is not spammed out of it’s mind that simple KEEP IT THAT WAY?

      • Guest
        Reply

        Google is a necessary evil, but unfortunately they have still not figured out that they are number one in destroying the value delivered by small companies. Of course that does not include small SEO companies – companies in an artificial industry propagated by Google.

        Google is still an academic paper indexer and has still not figured out that a website that is selling a product or service looks significantly different from a PhD dissertation.

        If I tripled the number of words on my pages (there goes clear and concise information to my potential clients) or if I replaced all design components with a simple table and HTML menu links to ‘improve’ the text vs. code ratio (Google’s idea of promoting better content for Internet surfers) then I would rank better in Google searches, but at the expense of my visitors’ experience on my website.

        To make up for my stupid insistence on clear information with an appealing design, I have to spend even more hours every week on building links from catalogs and directories that deliver no other value than pleasing Google. Every hour I am forced to spend on making up for the shortcomings of that academic paper indexer is an hour that I could have spent on developing my business and providing better personal service to my clients. I provide services in the real world, but to the academic paper index that is a world that does not exist – it is all about information (wait a second, I have to puke).

        Maybe it is time for me to realize that nobody needs the value I can provide with my small company. Maybe it is time I start blogging about how dust settle on my bookshelf or something else of higher value than personal service.

        • Stupidscript
          Reply

          It is not clear from your message about what you choose to write, but you are definitely unclear on how Google and the other search engines function.

          To break it down into the absurdly simple strata that you chose for your examples is to illustrate your misunderstanding. For example, your statement about tripling the text in your articles followed by your statement about the content-to-code ratio simply cancel each other out, right? Not to mention your use of tables (!) rather than the much more flexible, powerful and invisible DIV elements plus CSS shows that you have not really understood how modern web pages are built, or why they use the code that they do.

          What you need to do is to stop being a drama queen and start doing some serious learning. From your message, it is clear that you have the most superficial understanding of how SE ranking functions, and how what you put online is perceived. Spend a couple of WEEKS, at LEAST, reading and COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDING every document about SEO that Google has offered, and STOP complaining about how different that is from what you have already done.

          While you’re in the learning mode, READ AND UNDERSTAND the articles on this website about SEO, and how webmasters all over the world are enjoying great SERPs by simply doing what comes naturally, without trying to force the search engines to give you a good position.

          You’re getting so bogged down in teeny-weeny details (code-to-content ratios, link building with sites you imagine will help you with Google, etc. etc.) that you are failing to understand how truly simple it is to just write great stuff and put it online in a format that minimizes code bulk and is available to everyone who wishes to view it.

  30. If I get my keywords and use them as subdomains. But their index page is the same as that of my main website. It means I will get more people landing on my homepage. Then submit them to the search engines.

    I will get more traffic. But will I get finally penalized for that? I have not yet done it but just thinking about it. I need your advise on this.

    • Stupidscript
      Reply

      Here are the only questions you need to answer:

      1) Am I being tricky?

      If you are trying to “trick” the engines into increasing your rank, you might get lucky, for a little while, but you will only get a short term benefit, and you will likely be punished once the trick is revealed … which it WILL be.

      2) Or am I being honest?

      If you are writing honest material and presenting it in an honest, natural way designed to appeal to the human beings who will enjoy your work, then just keep on going. Honesty produces good results.

      The answer to the query you posed is #1, by the way.

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