How to link build for Bing!

Bing is Microsoft's latest re-branding of their search engine and it's starting to pick up steam and market share each month. Bing uses its own separate algorithm to return search results but its basically driven on links coming to your site as well.

It has been noted in numerous places, that Bing traffic is converting better for many internet webmasters, and there isn't any reason to ignore this trend or free traffic by also optimizing your link building strategies for Bing! as well as other engines like Google and Yahoo.

With Yahoo's search market share slipping and Bing gaining, if their search marketing deal goes thru, expect Bing! to have roughly a 30% market share of searches, that will surely put a small hurt on Google

Bing's policy on link building:

  Bing's position on link building is straightforward - we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent. Allow me to explain.

  Bing (as well as other search engines) places an extremely high priority on helping searchers find relevant and useful content through search. This is why we regularly say that search engine optimization (SEO) techniques oriented toward helping users are ultimately more effective than doing SEO specifically for search engine crawlers (aka bots).

  The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content.

Authority sites:

So what links are valuable? That's pretty easy, isn't it? If relevance is important, the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best of all. Sites that possess great content, that have a history in their space, that have earned tons of relevant, inbound links - basically, the sites who are authorities in their field - are considered authoritative sites. And as authorities, the outbound links they choose to make carry that much more value (you don't get to be an authority in your field by randomly linking out to irrelevant, junk sites). Good SEO practices, a steady history, great content, and other, authoritative inbound links beget authority status. The more relevant, authoritative inbound links you earn for your website, the more of an authority your site becomes in the eyes of search engines. These are the natural results of solid content and smart link building.

Going unnatural

So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you're trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site's content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms. This chicanery can range from relatively benign but useless efforts to overly aggressive promotion to outright fraud. And as the major search engine bots are continually crawling the entire Web, we see what is being done, the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more, we account for these cunning behaviors in our indexing values applied to those pages.

Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

* The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
* Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
* Using hidden links in your pages
* Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web
* Linking out to known web spam sites

When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Suggested Links:
Bing Webmaster Central
Web Hosting Reviews For SEO Friendly Hosting
Learn about Bing Webmaster Tools
Some of the useful information in this article can be found: Bing - Link building for smart webmasters (no dummies here) (SEM 101) - Webmaster Center Blog - Bing Community