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SEO question: Is it worth optimizing your site for more than just Google? Do Yahoo and Bing matter?
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Good SEO practices apply to all search engines, however there are some things that are Bing-specific. I can't tell you what you should do but for us (in Australia) Google dominates and with the time we would need to burn to set Bing specific advantages we would have gained a lot more if directed towards google-centric optimisation activities such as link building. In some cases it might be worth optimising for alternative search engines, for example if the first page seems too competitive in Google.
Yahoo! is powered by Bing these days, so they are effectively one and the same. I agree with Dejan- the basic elements of SEO apply to all search engines.
Since Google has become both a noun and a verb in the English language, I can say that it's my personal opinion that they don't matter. However, in my professional opinion, I can say that Yahoo! and Bing are competing for a very distant second place as far as search engines are concerned. When I hear somebody say "I'm gonna go Bing some hotels for my vacation next week," I'll believe that Bing matters.
We optimize for all search engines, not only for Google or Bing.
Adding local info to Bing and Yahoo makes sense, as well as Google. But for national content, once it is on Google, the others will find it.
in my country Mauritius, Google dominates and clients targeting the local markets do not bother to hear about other search engines ; )
Here we can just say "Google it" instead of saying am doing a search on search engine...
Why just Google and why not other search engines?
Nowadays, Google is turning out to be a fish market...way too crowded :-(
Google chasing SEO guys and SEO guys chasing Google!
No doubt Google amounts for a large chunk of traffic but that doesn't mean it converts into sales.
Why just Google and why not other search engines?
Nowadays, Google is turning out to be a fish market...way too crowded :-(
Google chasing SEO guys and SEO guys chasing Google!
No doubt Google amounts for a large chunk of traffic but that doesn't mean it converts into sales.
Are you talking about Google the search engine, or Google the company? Because one is just a processor of a milliion calculations, and the other is aiming to make searches more relevant to the user by programming those calculations.
Look at Google's +1 response to Facebook's "like" buttons. Clearly Google are seeing the value of social opinion, and if you have focused on being the best business you can be, then the people will let you know it. And who knows what Google will do in the future. My point is that it may become more relevant to provide value to people than SEO optimised content for a computer.
Bing-Yahoo search share is growing in the US, but it's still a laggard in most of the world. If the US is your core market then there are a couple of additional things to know and things to do for Bing.
Things to Know:
Bing made the decision that it wouldn't try to create as large an index as Google or keep up with Google's index growth (the index is the collection of pages that a search engine has crawled and is caching to serve). So bingbot doesn't crawl sites as frequently, isn't as aggressive about crawling deep pages and is slower to update it's index.
This means that new pages and changes to pages may take longer to be reflected and that defunct pages may stick around longer even after you install 301s or 404s. The only caveat to this is that your homepage and top-level categories tend to get handled almost as fast as on Google.
The other thing is that bingbot isn't as good as Google at crawling different URL strings, especially ones with large numbers of parameters and/or multiple special characters.
This means that pages with a large number of parameters or un-escaped special characters may not be crawled and can cause bingbot crawls to timeout. Look at Bing Webmaster Tools and at your server logs to see if there are any crawl errors that are stopping Bing from getting a clear picture of your content assets.
Things to Do:
2 things you can do to circumvent these crawl problems are 1) submit your XML sitemaps through Bing Webmaster Tools to make sure they know about all quality pages & 2) try your best to use short, simple (preferably keyword-optimized) URLs for both inbound links and internal linking on the site.
Both of these things are pretty straightforward and might already be implemented on your site. Beyond this, Dejan hit it on the head when he said that good SEO practice applies to all search engines.
Yes,
Bing and Yahoo own a 31.6% market share in the US, with the total search volume adding up to 5.2 billion searches per month.
Make the following improvements to help your Bing rankings; On-page SEO, Relevant Inbound Links, Linking Out, Blogs vs News Sites and Domain Age.
Contact me if you would like to learn more.
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