What are the KEY differences between Google and Bing?

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SEO Differences Between Google and Bing

Google vs Bing

As an SEO Professional I can say with confidence that the Google algorithm is one almighty robust cookie to deal with. Google Algorithm takes account keywords, quality of content and a clean, natural and appropriate link profile. Bing, on the other hand, differs in its selection; social search is impressively dominant, and the attempt to banish link spam has not been quite as successful. With Bing, local results over take it all.

Bing and Google’s algorithms are similar in many ways.

For example, optimizing URLs and domain names for keywords and having a large number of high-quality, dofollow backlinks are equally important to Bing/Yahoo and Google.

However, that’s pretty much where the similarities between the two search engines end. As far as the differences, here are the main ones to worry about:

Indexing

One of the important differences between Google and Bing is site indexing. It is seen that Google crawls and indexes the pages faster compared to Bing. Although, both provides submit URL's option in their webmaster tools

Website Type

While Google focuses on newer, commercial, or popular websites in its results, Bing tends to favor older websites with more official domain names, such as .edu or .gov. What does all this mean? Well, that Google is quick to offer up socially relevant sites, whereas Bing is more likely to provide factually relevant information.

Flash Media

While Google has a hard time figuring out what to do about Flash media, Bing does a great job of indexing it and offers extra credit for sites that use it.

Local

Local searches on Bing and Google will often have much different results, with Google’s often swaying in favor of larger, more established companies and Bing more likely to show small businesses. Why? Because when you search for local businesses on Bing, it assumes that you want the most proximal, which isn’t always the big-box store in town. Google, however, gives you the most credible, which often is the larger business.

Social

One of the things that sets Bing apart from Google the most is its approach to search by integrating social media. When searching on Bing, if a Facebook friend has recommended or rated the company or product mentioned in the search, the user can see it right away. Google hasn’t quite been able to integrate social media into their searches as well as Bing.

On-Page SEO

Google is much smarter than Bing when it comes to keywords. While Google is far more intuitive about the context of a page, Bing still relies heavily on keywords in page titles, meta tags, and on the page, which means that straightforward, specific keywords are the way to go for Bing SEO.

Sitelinks

In Google you can ask to have a sitelink removed, but there’s no way to do this with Bing.

Link building / Value

Bing has a webmaster centre, the first example being the “backlinks” area, There’s also an outbound links – actually that’s quite an awesome tool! For every link your website has, Bing assigns a “page score” to help indicate the value of those links.

Query matching in the domain name

An exact match domain has the highest (most powerful) correlation to rankings. Google is slightly higher than Bing – but exact match domains are the way to go, hyphenated versions are less powerful but more frequent (powerful) in Bing. Just having keywords in the domain name has substantial positive correlation for both engines.

Exact match domain names by TLD extension (.com, net etc)

Exact match domains using .coms have a more powerful correlation to rankings in Google and Bing. Bing seems not to mind so much with exact match domains that are .net, org etc.

Keywords in sub-domains

Using all the keywords in the subdomain – seems to be some correlation between keyword use in the subdomain and Google rankings, but much less so with Bing. Bing may be rewarding subdomain keywords a lot less than previously, and generally speaking KW’s in subdomains are not nearly as powerful as the main domain

Website homepages

Bing has substantial correlation with homepage out performing internal pages in the search results. Google has a slight preference as well, but less so than Bing.

Anchor text link matches

The raw quantity of exact match anchor text links correlates hardly at all with rankings. It’s about linking root domains with exact match anchor text links. In fact this is the highest of all correlative metrics for high rankings. Bing seems more “Google like” now than they were around 10 moths ago.

Features with high correlation to rankings

– Exact match .coms domais

– Exact match anchor text

– Linking RDs

– Quantity of links

Link attributes are still extremely powerful, and more important than on page SEO factors. Google and Bing are remarkably similar in SEO, and more so than they were last year.

Here’s the post on SEOmoz: Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements

Canonical Requirements:

Google supports the use of the Canonical tag as a way for website owners to easily avoid duplicate content issues. Bing, on the other hand, does not support the Canonical tag and does not offer Canonical URL management in their Webmaster Center.

Page Size:

page size is less of an issue for Google crawler. Bing, however, currently only caches the first 100k of most web pages (although the range is more like 95k-105k).

301 & 302 Redirects:

Although Google prefers a 301 redirect, a 302 will not cause major issues with indexing. However, if a website employs a 302 Canonical redirect instead of a 301, Bing will not follow the redirect and, in many cases, will refuse to index the website altogether.

Meta Refreshes:

Some websites still utilize a Meta Refresh to redirect users. Bing and Google handle this technique very differently. Google will follow a zero-second Meta refresh and treat it like a 301. Bing will not. As a matter of fact, the use of a Meta Refresh will terminate the Bing crawler from accessing any more of the website being indexed.

Answer source and other few links:

Tool: Compare Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Blekko Rankings

Google vs Bing vs Yahoo

The short story is that both search engines have different algorithms and effectively give different weight to various signals. So, if you rank at position five in Google, you may not even be within the top three hundred in Bing. For the SEO specialist, this poses a challenging task. Often, a side must be picked-- and the same goes for users. Want local searches? Looking for a hotel or restaurant that your Facebook friends may have reviewed? Then Bing is your man. Looking for a something informative, something high-quality or something serviceable wherever you may be? Then Google is the one for you.