There is not a lot of 'chatter' on the SEO street about the rules that Bing uses when assessing a site for ranking, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has come up with some advice in the form of some dos and don'ts of link-building (for Bing.)
As you would expect, this advice is not a lot different to Google's, but it is always good to get news from the 'horses mouth' in areas like this (getting it wrong could be fatal).
Bing views links in a similar way to Google, placing emphasis on the 'quality' of links when determining rankings. Rick is however at pains to point out "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," adding, "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."
So What Should You NOT Do
Do any of these and there is a good chance that your site will be closely reviewed by one of Bing's 'quality engineers'. The penalties were also spelled out by Rick "When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction and 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."
1. So don't increase your links too fast as this smacks of 'artificial' engineering. Yes, I know you can go and 'buy' a 1,000 (non paid) links in the form of blogs and forum posts, just don't do it overnight!
2. Beware of having too many inbound links from irrelevant blog comments and forums.
3. Never use hidden links in your pages
4. Avoid the paid link farms, link exchanges programes and any other "bad neighbourhoods" on the Web
5. Be careful who you link out too. Remember as this is far more easily controlled by the website owner, so a lot of mistakes here can really get you into trouble. Thus linking out to 'known' web spam sites is a no no (I always check sites to see if they are in Google's index, if they are not then they are probably 'trouble' and not worth linking too anyway.)
What You SHOULD Do
1. Develop your Brand and ensure that relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers are aware of your site and it's content and encourage them to link to you.
3. Use Online Press releases
4. Publish 'expert articles' on the many online article directory sites available
5. Try to participate in as many conversations on blogs and forums that are relevant to your site, using links / your ID script to refer / link back to your site (when applicable).
6. Use the social networks in order to increase the 'footprint' of your site / brand, but here ensure you have links to your site in all your profiles.
7. Use E-newsletters and to notify all of the new content on your site and keep both the site and the E-newsletter fresh and informative.
8. Have a blog or forum on your site, or at least linked to the site.
All of this is not really news to any search marketer who has been around the block a few times, but if you are new to the game, following this advice will help your rankings on Bing and Google and that can't be bad now can it?
More Tomorrow
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