Google vs Bing: Advanced SEO Analytics

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Search marketing is my second passion after web analytics and getting analytics insights on search/seo is pretty cool. Rand Fishkin (seomoz CEO), did a great presentation on search analytics comparison of Google and Bing at SMX Advanced Seattle. The session was about using data to show what are some of the key influencers of ranking in Google and Bing.

Bing being a key competitor to Google is not different atleast algorithmically as far as the ranking factor goes. There are striking similarities on the criteria used for ranking between Google and Bing.

TLD Extensions – Top level domains with .gov and .org extensions have the highest possibility of ranking higher in both Google and Bing. The most interesting part is .org is rated higher to rank than .com and it is quiet surprising.

Tip – Grab .org extension for your site and build a community on that domain or redirect to your .com domain.

Keyword in Domain – A website with target keywords in the domain name has the highest correlation with rankings higher on search.

Here is a quick example of my blog ranking higher in search because of the keyword in the domain.

Tip – Buy domains with your target keywords and build micro sites with unique content on those domains.

Keyword in subdomain – Sometimes it is harder to get a keyword rich domain and another alternative is to go for a keyword filled sub domain. Data shows that Google gives some important and Bing does not factors this in their SERPs ranking.

Tip – Stay away from creating too many subdomains to gain higher ranking in search. Create sub domains only if you feel it is required from user point of view.

On page keyword usage – Both Bing and Google ranking analysis data show a small correlation between on page keyword usage and ranking. Alt image is useful to search ranking in some cases, and so is putting keywords in the url.

In the example below, the website webhostingsearch.com has the word “dedicated server hosting” 10 times on the page in comparison to webhostinggeeks.com (3 times) and it still ranks lower. The reason is webhostinggeeks.com has over 2000 unique links to the page and webhostingsearch.com has only 246 unique links to the page.

External links – Having a small number of links from multiple websites is 10x better than having a large number of links from the same website. Websites rank higher if they have diversity in link sources and there is a high correlation for this in both Google and Bing.

Tip – Diversify your link building strategies to multiple avenues. Build social links along with content links and viral links.

Length of url – Data shows that shorter urls rank higher in search than longer urls.

Tip – I have seen that blog links with longer url tend to rank higher in search, and clearly Google and Bing have different set of rules for different types of sites. This could be because blog links are generally longer. It is ok to have longer blog post links but keep your website links short because it helps users remember the url easily.

Anchor text – The number of unique links with anchor text influence the ranking of a website. Having anchor text diversity is as important as the link diversity.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

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Seo Manager
Seo Manager
9 years ago

I know this post is old, but I wonder if with all new rules from Google Analytics this rules can be applied?