Bing, the SEO Friendly Search Engine

Do you believe in link love at first site or should I refresh my browser?

How’s that for a pick-up line at the next SEO mixer?

Of course links haven’t been all love lately, with Google’s Penguin punishing sites for involvement in any manipulative linking practices and negative SEO becoming a real threat.

Curiously enough, yesterday news dropped that marries the topics of link penalties and flirting.

Bing has been aggressively courting the SEO community. Among Bing’s moves to curry our favor is the recent Phoenix Update of Bing Webmaster Tools. And now Bing has introduced a link disavow protocol for handling pesky rotten links you just can’t get removed.

When I spoke with Bing Webmaster Tools manager Duane Forrester earlier this month about the new tools for SEOs, like Link Explorer and SEO Recommendations, I got the impression that Bing is committed to serving marketers. In his own words:

“Investing in Webmaster Tools is a way to partner at scale with website owners. If we offer insights that help them improve their site, those improved sites provide us with better results for searchers. Be that through a better user experience on the site, or through fixing issues which might impede discoverability. It makes sense to partner with webmasters and enable them as best we can.”

It makes sense for Bing to position itself as the SEO-friendly search engine as it battles for search market share with Google. If webmasters and SEOs view Bing as the engine that gives them the most actionable data and useful tools, there an incentive for businesses to push consumers to Bing.

It’s kind of like supply-side economics. By stimulating the suppliers they can create great products that consumers want to buy in turn. And as for the power of marketers to influence consumers to choose Bing over Google, tech advice by SEOs holds weight. On a personal level, the SEOs I know are considered the most tech savvy among their family, friends and peer groups. Their suggestion to try out Bing will at least earn a moment of pause.

On the flip side of the equation is demand-side economics. And the trick is that both work, and they work best together. The Bing marketing team has been doing great things to position the search engine as a powerful tool for the hip, modern Internet user.

And as I sort through this economics model I just had a light bulb moment: Forrester’s email display name says Bing Ecosystem right in it.

Bing is creating an ecosystem around its services, and meeting SEOs’ demands is one corner of Bing’s efforts. They’re stoking the fires of demand by demonstrating the value of their search to a cool and tech savvy set and supporting a cashback rewards program for users. And the search engine is stimulating growth through the supply chain with continual improvements to search products and incentives to site owners to create the best business experience on the web.

In other words, Bing’s using that other fool-proof pickup line on SEOs: “Hey baby, I think I’d be a good return on your investment.” ;)

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.