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.