The Difference Between Google & Bing in Search
Many SEO freaks will love to rank in the 3 big players of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. While many seem to think they all work similarly, only few tend to understand the strengths and the way the 3 work differently to suit the needs of their own search campaigns.
This entry is not a pro-Bing or Google, but fret not this entry is not trying to belittle any parties. This might be useful for SEO consultants who wish to know more about the strengths of Bing and what Bing can offer over Google.
Firstly, as much as Bing love the ordinary sitemaps, it seems to loathe video or news xml’s. Also there is not evidence that Bing supported image sitemaps. That means, Bing only seem to love the standard sitemap.
Bing is more local search friendly. It seems that the result generated for a query will immediately trigger results that contain local connections. For instance if you are querying about a social event, Bing will bring up the relevant results by for that kind of event. In short it generates results based on your IP by serving what is near you.
Google is famous for it’s Sitelinks. Only offered to websites with credible content and reputation. Not to mention high traffic. And once you obtained them, is yours. You are free to tweak them once it appears in your Google Webmaster. Sadly this is not the case with Bing. You earn them once you are reputable, but you are not free to do whatever you want with it. Bing will determine what is served by default.
In Bing Webmaster Tools, the backlinks report offers links that points to your site with its respective value. The only downside is you can download the first 1000 results and nothing more that that. To ensure that you can capture the best leads for your own self analysis, is best to check them daily so you don’t missed out the best days in that report.
Bing is not so friendly with news submit compared to Google. This is because Google supports news submit though have to pass through its review before letting their spiders to crawl your submission. In Bing, submission is handled via email and they only accept submission with an RSS feed attached.
Bing is not okay with free ecommerce feed submission for free but Google does. Bing only offer paid only submission on that basis.
Enough of Bing-bashing, lets see what Bing have to offer:
- Document review – something like Ask.com, Bing features video that can be run inline within the previews itself, but surprisingly (also ironically), Youtube only. The order can be controlled if you know how by putting H1 tags, first paragraph information and contact info in order.
- Social sharing – tag it to Facebook, Twitter or email. This seems to appear from results via search results.
- Block previews with robot.txt – can be done on the page as well just by adding x-robots-tags: nopreview
There you have it. Bing vs Google, though not big significance but at least for SEO consultants, you are pretty much aware of what Bing have to offer over Google.