Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, has had an active year. It continues to try to set itself apart and gain traction against the search engine behemoth of Google. These four big changes with Bing this year could be good news for SEOs.
Check Out Your Link Profile
Bing’s Webmaster Tools provide the biggest changes with Bing this year for SEOs, giving webmasters the ability to more closely monitor how and where their site appears on the Internet. It allows you to find out where you appear and what links to your personal or business profile are not connecting. You then have the option to not only include tie-ins to your Facebook or LinkedIn profile and even view what other websites you have linked to on your page or accounts.
Disavow Links
This may be one of the most important features of Bing’s new additions. A website is most likely to find itself at the top of search engine results when multiple other sites link back to it, but those are only helpful if those links are on legitimate, quality sites. This new tool from Bing allows you to disavow links to your site from other websites you don’t know, don’t trust and feel could hurt your website and your website search engine rankings by association.
Remember that most search engines don’t operate by simple algorithms to determine where your website should be placed on their site. There are often complex processes in place to weed out false or dangerous results and even actual people to perform result checks. If they find that your site is linked through a dangerous or junk website, it could be flagged in a way that prevents it from showing in results or that it shows much, much lower than it would have otherwise.
Integration of Social Media
Bing gives you more than one opportunity to show on search listings with its integration of social media. T he search engine has long been incorporating Facebook data into its profiles, which gives businesses and individuals with profiles on the site the opportunity to boost their notice on the site.
The addition of a new sidebar gives another opportunity to not only appear on search engine results but for a business or individual with a Facebook profile to find itself at the top of the page.
New Layout
The new layout for Bing is much sleeker and more beneficial to sites hoping to show high on result searches. Those companies paying for suggested searches find themselves no longer tucked away into a sidebar but instead under the search bar, navigational tools are much smaller, while account controls are larger and more prominent.
The changes makes Bing easier for you and searchers to use, which could allow for it to be a stronger competitor against the reigning search champ, Google, and considering the efforts Bing has made to help SEO and Google’s coding updates that have made SEO more difficult, that is good news for websites, SEOs, and search engine users.
Jason Nelson provided this post on behalf of ColeParmer.com where you can check out their ph meter and other great lab equipment products.