In the world of SEO you don’t hear much about Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This is because Bing is still has less than a 10 percent market share of all search engine traffic. However, it is gaining its market share, and fast to the demise of Yahoo. This increase in Bing’s market share has SEO’s looking at how to rank well for this new search engine that is still in its infancy compared to Google and Yahoo.
Not much has surfaced on how to rank well in Bing’s SERP’s due to its age, but in the webmasters blog on the Bing website it does tell us their link building policy and how to go about building links. It reads very much like a Google blog on link building, using many of the same standards as Google. The blog talks about site relevance, authority sites, and what will get you penalized.
In the blog they talk about something they call “spam rank” which factors how ‘spammy’ your site is, the lower the better. They also mentioned that in the webmaster tools on Bing, they tell you if your site is blocked from the index, and why which is new compared to Google. This tool could prove to be useful if a webmasters site is penalized from both Google and Bing, they can actually fix the problem instead of guessing why you were penalized in the first place.
Bing’s growing popularity may be the end for Yahoo, especially since both companies are in talks about Bing taking over Yahoo anyway. It is unlikely that Bing will be a major problem for Google by itself, but if they take over Yahoo, Bing could have a combined market share of 28 percent compared to Google’s 65 percent. The future of search engines could be an all-out cyber war.
Google has been playing with the idea of making site speed a ranking factor for a while now. It started with the release of Google Caffeine in a sandbox for web developers and SEO’s to see how queries will be affected. Google says that Caffeine will allow Google to index sites faster and provide better results.
Google Says Site Speed Will Become a Factor—>
Probably one of the biggest SEO mistakes that people are making today is not deep linking. There are hundreds of websites that have a good design and have a respectable PR on their homepage, but start to click around and you will find out that the rest of the site has as PR 0 or worse. This is a prime example of poor or lazy SEO, and so many people are making this mistake. It is understandable to have your homepage to have a high ranking, but don’t forget that your site is more than just one page. You homepage usually does not have the majority of the content that you want people to see anyway. Optimizing these interior or deep pages will benefit your overall rank in the SERPs and increase your PageRank across your site as well.
The objective of deep linking is to optimize specific pages on your website for the one or two keywords that they focus on. For example, imagine that you were a vet and had a page on your website for each type of animal that you treated i.e. cats, dogs, horses, etc. Now instead of optimizing your homepage for each type of animal you treat and optimizing for you being a vet, with deep linking you would only optimize your homepage for you being a vet (i.e. vet in “your-city”). Then you would optimize your page about cats, your page about dogs, and your page about horses separately. If your on-site link structure is setup correctly, this type of optimization will benefit your entire site because as your deep pages gain in PageRank, they will share that with the pages above them. Now instead of having a site where your homepage has a PR of 3 and the rest of your site is PR0, you will have your homepage PR3 and your deep pages will have PR1 or 2.
Deep linking will also make your site more user friendly. Say a person is searching for a horse vet and they come to your site. Now if you optimized your homepage for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and end up on your homepage, only having to look around for your page about horses. Instead, if your optimized your page about horses for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and immediately be on your page about horses. This provided instant satisfaction, which is what internet users want. This will increase your chances of converting potential customers into real customers.
There are some instances where deep linking is not necessary. These would be for pages you don’t necessarily want people to see like a “terms & conditions” page, or pages that are not that important for users to see right away like a “contact us” page. Also, if you have a small site with just a few pages, deep linking may not be too important because your PageRank will naturally trickle down to your interior pages if you have the right setup.
Google has officially removed PageRank from it webmaster tools. This comes after years of subtle hints that PageRank is not as important as people would think.
Google PageRank is Gone —>