Link Building for Bing
Ever since Microsoft came out with their new search engine Bing, there have been lots of buzzing about it. And good buzz at that…not what people expected to see which was just a name change from “Live.com” to “Bing.com” and nothing more.
But Bing has taken a lot of people by surprise and now that Yahoo! has agreed to use Bing’s search results as their own search engine (thus taking the number of major search engines down to 2), it’s a very big deal and has great potential to be a big competitor for Google.
Just for the record, the use of Bing’s search results at Yahoo.com probably won’t come to light until sometime in 2010 or beyond, but it is something to start taking notice of right now.
Because we know that this change is coming, we can be fully prepared for it. And that means doing a few things to be sure that our websites are on top of these changes starting today.
I’ll be covering Bing in sections during the upcoming newsletters but for now, I want to focus on one of the more crucial elements of getting listed well in Bing and this is where your linking strategy comes into play.
Unlike Google who tends to keep information on ranking well in their search engine pretty close to the hip, only divulging just enough information, Bing seems to be moving in the opposite direction. While not full-disclosure by any means, Bing does give you a lot of tips and ideas when it comes to ranking well with them.
So let’s take a look at what Bing considers to be important where linking strategies are concerned.
The do’s and the don’ts.
While some of the do’s and don’ts of link building will seem familiar to you if you’ve engaged in link building where Google is concerned, some of the advice through Bing is easier to understand… and truly gives a “no bones about it” kind of approach.
So, let’s cover what these do’s and don’ts are.
DO – Link TO (that is from your own site) other websites that your site visitors would find helpful and useful. When you link to another site you are telling your site visitor that you “endorse” that site, so be sure that you actually do. Don’t link to a website just because it’s your Mom’s or you promised a friend you would link to them. If it isn’t helpful and complimentary to your own, skip it.
Do – Link to other sites that are relevant to your own. A wedding cake website linking to a tuxedo rental website would be relevant. A local coffee shop linking to a PPC marketing product would not be relevant. The same holds true for those links that point to you – granted you can’t control who links to you, you can influence this to an extent. IF you are engaging in a link-building campaign where you ask other site owners to link to you, be sure that those sites are relevant to your own.
Do attempt to get high-quality links pointing to you. Quantity is NOT the same thing as quality. This also holds true for Google. Just because you have thousands of incoming links to your site does not mean that you’ll rank well. What matters is the quality of those links. A thousand poor low-quality links cannot equal the ranking power of one high-quality link.
Do not participate in site-wide linking strategies from “bad neighborhoods”. Search engines know what a bad neighborhood is because the bad neighborhoods give off certain signals. Bad neighborhoods often consist of families of websites that all link to one another, have little to no content in and of themselves and often cover every kind of topic under the sun.
You want links from authority sites – those sites that are older (and thus “more reliable” as stated by Bing), have had consistent content on them over time and have high quality links pointing to their site as well as away from their site.
You can use this tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to help you determine if a neighborhood is “bad” or not.
Do use proper canonicalization. This means that you use one style of URL for every link within your site. If you remember in a past blog post I had talked about how the search engines view different variations of your URL as different domains all-together.
This means that http://YourSite.com and http://www.YourSite.com are viewed as two separate URLs. Why this is detrimental to you as the site owner, is because the importance of your websites are then spread across two domains instead of one – thus reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.
Now, as you’ve probably guessed, you can’t control how others link to you and they will use a vast number of ways to point to your URL which the search engines will all consider different UNLESS you set up a 301 redirect on each of the subsequent domain names.
So for instance if you wanted http://YourSite.com to be your primary URL that you referred people to and that you used consistently as absolute links on your own site, then…
- www.YourSite.com
- YourSite.com/
- www.YourSite.com/
- YourSite.com/index.html
- www.YourSite.com/index.html
- etc.
All need to have a 301 redirect set up on them that point to the URL you want to be your “main” URL. In this case, YourSite.com. Whenever you link within your own site, always, ALWAYS use the YourSite.com or whatever URL you have determined to be your primary URL.
Additionally use absolute links everywhere on your site. An absolute link means that you actually place the “http://www…whatever your site is.
For example, if you had a page on your site named “espresso-beans.html” and you linked to this page from any other page on your site, it should look like this: <a href=”http://www.YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html“> Espresso beans</a> and NOT <a href=”espresso-beans.html”> Espresso Beans </a>.
This is referred to as an “absolute URL” and as Bing states “The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL.”
When linking to your home page within your own site, use the trailing slash and omit the “index.html” or “default.html” whatever the name of your default home page is. For example:
http://www.YourSite.com/ and not http://www.YourSite.com (notice the lack of the trailing slash.)
Bing also suggests that you use the title attribute within your internal links. For example:
<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” title=”keyword or key phrase describing the page you’re linking to“>Anchor text link (also the keyword or keyword phrase) </a>.
For sites that use dynamic linking (in other words pull descriptions and item numbers from a database), you know that the URL to those pages can get quite long. Do a search on Amazon.com for any book title and then take a look at the URL in your address bar. As you can imagine, these kinds of links can make a search engines job quite difficult.
In order to help the search engines use a more user-friendly version of that URL so that they don’t have to do a lot of hard work understanding the link, add some special code into the head section of your web page that will tell the search engines which canonical URL to use.
Ex: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://YourSite.com/products.php?item=espressobeans” /> And be absolutely certain that this link actually points to the page you want it to go to and that it WORKS.
Bing suggests to use the nofollow tag on your links if you don’t want them to follow that link. However, if you want to block an entire page of links from being crawled, instead use the meta robots tag to block access to that content or use a robots.txt file.
What a nofollow tag looks like:
<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” rel=”nofollow”> Espresso beans </a>.
What a meta robots tag looks like:
<meta content=”noindex, nofollow”> (this tells the search engines to NOT index nor follow all of the links on the page this is located on.
You can also use:
<meta content=”index, nofollow”> which means that the search engines will still index your web page but they won’t follow any links on the page itself.
In summary, we know that the merger of search results between Bing and Yahoo! will be a significant step in the right direction where the search engines are concerned. And we’re also aware that Bing is starting to get lots of great feedback.
Since Bing is new, relatively speaking, they are handing you outright information that can help you rank better with them. Use these suggestions for your own site’s benefits. All of these suggestions will work well with Google as well…rarely do we see a big change of what’s allowed and what’s not where the search engines are concerned. But, Bing is a little more forthright with their information … which is something we haven’t seen in a long time with Google.