It's mighty hard to find anything concrete on Bing's ranking algorithm but certain trends keep cropping up. With Microsoft set to take over Yahoo and Bing becoming Google's closest challenger it seems pertinent to cover some of the fundamentals for effective search engine optimisation in Bing.

Comscore/Hitwise reports that Bing and Yahoo together currently have around 25% share of the marketplace, however a more accurate figure would be 20% because a significant percentage of the search queries recorded in Yahoo and Bing are for internal properties (Yahoo Finance, for example) whilst on Google the majority of search queries lead users to external sites.

In Layman's terms, Bing will have one fifth of the search volume for queries that lead to web sites that you or I own. It's a significant enough portion to warrant a basic understanding of the ranking factors involved, so here goes:

Keywords in Domain Have Heavy Weighting

Bing appears to place significantly more weight on keywords that appear in the domain name for those keyword related search terms.

I, and many others on the Bing webmaster forum (including those contributing to this thread here: http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/648099.aspx), have noticed that certain doorway sites are achieving particularly high spots and are being bolstred by having the keyword phrase in the domain name.

Interestingly, the site in question (in the above linked thread) was submitted to the BING spam team around 6 months ago and I have just found the site ranked on page 2 in 19th place. This shows a drop in rankings, but not significant enough to be a penalisation.

The listing is in a similar position on Google and since the thread was originally created seems to have had a surge of powerful backlinks added.

On-site Optimisation

This area seems to be still very similar to Google. It's important to have your keyphrases in the title, meta description and scattered throughout the body at around a 2% density.

Unlike Google, I've yet to see any evidence that Bing punishes for over-optimisation for a certain keyword phrase. I'm not saying it doesn't occur, just that it is not widely discussed anywhere across the blogosphere so may not be a factor.

Backlink Strategies

Similar to Google, BING relies heavily on some kind of backlinking algorithm. Interestingly, it appears that you can get away with 'dirtier' quality links on Bing and have them contribute to your rankings – a point noted by the gurus at http://www.seomoz.org.

On Google, any sign of a poor quality link and it's likely that said link won't count as a backlink 'vote' – this hit home a couple of years ago when a webmaster queried Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team, as to why his site that had over 1,000 backlinks wasn't listed anywhere near the top of the SERPs. Apparently (I wasn't there unfortunately), Matt logged in and could claimed that he could see all the backlinks, but that Google was only counting 3 out of the 1,000.

It may be worth spending a small portion of your time going after those links that might not get you anywhere in Google but will help within Bing; links that perhaps aren't particularly relevant or from sites with a high volume of outbound links.

Here's an interesting post at seowizz.net – half way through the comments the owner of one of the SEO companies analysed in the blog post chips in and gives his view of proceedings - http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/bing-seo-how-does-it-differ-to-google.html

The NoFollow Attribute

The nofollow attribute is respected by Bing in that any links with nofollow won't influence the ranking of the page that is being linked to.

A recent study by at SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-update-to-our-testing-on-pagerank-sculptin...) indicated that having nofollow backlinks may be beneficial for rankings to some degree, although they obviously have far less effect than follow links. As far as I'm aware, a similar study hasn't been performed on Bing.

A Summary Of Key Points

Bing's ranking is really not a whole lot different to Google - for many keyphrases you'll see fairly comparable results between the two search engines. However, there are a few differences. If optimising for Bing, I suggest the following:-

1. Purchase a domain that contains the main keyword phrase that you are optimising for.
2. Have a heavy backlinking strategy. Bare in mind that the link quality doesn't necessarily have to be as high as it does for Google for backlinks to count.
3. Don't bother chasing nofollow links - they'll have little to no effect on your ranking.
4. Acquire links from pages with your keywords in the title tag (http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/bing-seo-how-does-it-differ-to-google.html)
5. Domain age is important - try to acquire an older domain rather than starting a new site with a freshly registered one.
6. On site optimisation similar to Google. Ensure keywords are in Title, Meta Description and are in the page at around 2% density.

Have you had any experiences getting your site ranked in Bing? If so, I would love to hear from you below...