What does Microsoft want?

Microsoft’s alliance with Open AI and their emergence as a front runner in the AI race means they are once again under the scrutiny of SEOs.

With such a small percentage of the market, Bing has never come close to competing with Google on search. Many of the SEO tactics that work on Bing are the same tactics Google wiped out with the Penguin algorithm update in 2012. This means an SEO has two choices, either compete on Bing and risk a Google penalty, or compete on Google and lose out to black hat SEO on Bing. With Bing having as little as 7% of the search market, it’s a no brainer that most reputable SEOs would focus on Google.

Bing, however, has provided an interesting contrast to Google, and Microsoft has been much more open regarding ranking metrics. They issue their own Webmaster Guidelines which outlay a wide range of ranking factors.

Bing freely admits it uses engagement metrics to help rank pages, which is something Google has never admitted. In the section ‘How Bing ranks your content’ they list what they are looking for:

Relevance:

Relevance refers to how closely the content on the landing page matches the intent behind the search query. This includes matching terms directly on the page and phrases used in links referring to the page. Bing also considers semantic equivalents, including synonyms or abbreviations, which may not be exact matches of the query terms but are understood to have the same meaning. Many queries may have more than one possible intent. Bing tries to provide a comprehensive set of results that reflect all possible intents. Bing presumes the user seeks high-quality, authoritative content unless the user clearly indicates an intent to find low-authority content.

Bing

This is a no brainer and it’s basically confirming that keyword relevance and on page SEO are essential ranking factors.

Quality and Credibility:  

Determining the quality and credibility (QC) of a website includes evaluating the clarity of purpose of the site, its usability, and presentation. QC also consists of an evaluation of the page’s authoritativeness, which includes such factors as the author’s or site’s reputation, the level of discourse (for example, an article with citations and references to data sources is considered higher quality than one that does not explain or cite it’s data sources; pages that call for violence, name-calling, offensive statements, or use derogatory language to make a point are generally considered low quality), the completeness of the content, and transparency of authorship

Bing

Similar to Google, Bing use their own human quality raters to assess websites and feed this information into the algorithm. I’ve never come across a copy of these guidelines, but I assumed they have been leaked to the community. I also assume there isn’t anything revelatory in there and they are most probably pretty much identical to Google.

User engagement:

Bing also considers how users interact with search results. To determine user engagement, Bing asks questions like: Did users click through to search results for a given query, and if so, which results? Did users spend time on these search results they clicked through or quickly return to Bing? Did the user adjust or reformulate their query? The Bing Webmaster Dashboard will provide insights into how users interact with your webpages.

Bing WMT

This is refreshing to see Bing state that user engagement is a ranking metric. It’s obvious when you think about it, but Google has never stated it as clearly as Bing has here.

Freshness:

Generally, Bing prefers fresh content. The page that consistently provides up-to-date information is considered fresh. In many cases, content produced today will still be relevant years from now. In some cases, however, content produced today will go out of date quickly.

Bing WMT

Freshness isn’t a surprise either, and Google takes freshness into consideration when ordering results too.

Location:

In ranking results, Bing considers the user’s location (country and city), where the page is hosted, the language of the page, and the location of other visitors to the page.

Bing WMT

This is just confirming that results can be tailored to a user’s IP. Google has been doing this since 2012.

Page load time:

Slow page load times can lead a visitor to leave your website, potentially before the content has even loaded, to seek information elsewhere. Bing may view this as a poor user experience and a less helpful search result. Faster page loads are always better, but webmasters should balance absolute page load speed with a positive, useful user experience.

Bing WMT

Nothing surprising in page load times being a ranking factor. It’s a key part of the usability of a website.

Bing has set itself apart from Google in its openness and states that it won’t penalise websites for buying links. This appears to have backfired because there is far more spam on Bing than on Google search. They also admit they take social signals into account, which is something Google has never admitted.

Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence. If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Bing WMT

It’s going to be interesting to see how GPT performs with Copilot because Microsoft are serious about taking a larger share of the search market. Google thus far have failed miserably in coming up with a response to ChatGPT. It makes for interesting times, and if Bing does start gaining popularity, then a lot more focus will be placed on Bing SEO. It also raises the question of whether SEO can be applied to artificial intelligence itself. But this is another story.