Bing – features and SEO recommendations, one month on

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At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft justified many of Bing’s new features by noting that 50% of search queries are either abandoned or refined – users aren’t getting the right answer on the first try, citing studies by Jakob Nielsen, Enquiro and internal testing. Microsoft also said that searchers are becoming more focused more on tasks and decisions – consequently search engine sessions are becoming longer as users work their way through their decision making process.

As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at what the Bing rollout means for search marketers and, in a separate article, current search engine market shares.

Something old, something new, something borrowed

Many of Bing’s new features aren’t so new. Ask.com introduced their binoculars in 2004. Prior to Bing, Microsoft Live Search experimented themselves with site preview. Astute users of Google will recognize that Google already offers many of Bing’s features, such as in depth links for the first or second search listing. What Google hasn’t every done was a bi[n]g bang education campaign. New Google features tend to appear in end-user testing and may eventually be announced on one of the Google blogs. Good enough communication for SEO practitioners, but probably not noticed by the press or general public.

The Bing team does deserve tremendous credit for taking some of the best elements of what has been tried over time by different search engines and applying them to real search needs as identified through current searcher behavior.

Different versions create high expectations, yet confusion, in Europe

With the Bing release, Microsoft did an excellent job communicating to the press, webmasters and the general public. That said, Microsoft did create a bit of confusion as most of the new features touted were only seen initially by users in the US.

As an example, the site preview which appears when you hover over a search result seems to be limited to English language versions of Bing, e.g. the US, UK and Canada. It is not available in several European countries I sampled, e.g. Germany nor in Italy. Nor is the site preview available, at the time of this writing, for the French Canadian version of Bing.

Figure 1: Bing as seen in America

Figure 2: Bing in Europe is a different, more staid affair (at least for now)

Ciao Ciao, hello Bing shopping

The primary new feature in Europe, besides a new name, is the migration of the former Ciao user generated product reviews service to Bing Shopping. Ciao served France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Bing now offers Web, Image, Video, Shopping, News and Map search features in most major European markets. Yet smaller countries like Portugal will only see Web and Image search. Russia, home to local search engines Rambler and Yandex, is currently only offered Web, Image and Video search.

Health, Local, Shopping and Travel verticals in the US

The US version of Bing puts task oriented vertical (topic) search metaphorically front and center – more precisely, on the left where they are much more evident than the similar links Google has discretely offered at the top of the page. Bing’s choice of verticals may be driven by user needs; yet I would imagine verticals were selected in part on the basis of how potentially lucrative they will be. Somebody has to pay for search after all.

Bing search refinement options

Perform a Bing search for some popular mancurians and Bing really starts to strut its stuff. Band and album cover images appear along with the obligatory Wikipedia entry – not much different than what Google does for a similar search. Yet where Google offers related search links hidden away at the bottom of the page, Bing moves them up to the left.

It gets better. After the first few results, Bing offers clusters of related results, what Bing calls Web Groups. Again, Bing isn’t doing anything really new here. Teoma offered subject specific results and Clusty, well, the name says it all. For the Smiths query, Bing offers the first cluster of images as above, and, scrolling down the page, result clusters for Lyrics, Biography, Tour, Tabs (as in Guitar Tabs), Songs and Videos.

Bing specific SEO considerations

Generally I’m safe in saying that my SEO recommendations for visibility in Google are valid for other search engines and for site usability as well. However, there are a few Bing specific things to keep in mind.

Bing Webmaster Dashboard

If you haven’t done it already, do go ahead and enable Bing’s Webmaster tools. One of the things you might do there is specify a custom sitemap.xml file name and location, as you can with Google webmaster tools and Yahoo!’s Site Explorer. I recommend that you DON’T specify the sitemap location in robots.txt, you don’t really want to make it that easy to scrape your site, do you?

Site preview

A webmaster can disable Bing’s site preview feature by using the Bing nopreview meta robots tag or as a X-Robots http header. The Bing site preview may have trouble interpreting Flash sites, yet another reason to avoid this proprietary technology.

Use the title attribute in anchor tags for links

The html syntax allows a title attribute to be added to many html tags. Some browsers display it when the mouse hovers over the html element – allowing developers an easy way to add tooltips, great for site usability. In past tests, I’ve found Google to ignore the contents of the title attribute (not to be confused with the title tag!); this makes sense as the title attribute is so rarely found in the wild it wouldn’t make sense for them to spend much time on it.

In an article, the Bing team says go ahead and use the title attribute on internal links as a way to better qualify the link’s target page. You should keep usability in mind – if you do, you’ll avoid the temptation to stuff all your keywords in the link title attribute. In a quick test, I did not yet see evidence that bing is using the title attribute, but I don’t doubt they will.

Title tag rewriting

Another issue which has emerged is a Bing tendency to reword page titles to include a searcher’s specified keyword or keyword phrase. AdWords advertisers familiar with dynamic keyword insertion will recognize yet another feature which isn’t exactly new.

A few SEO practitioners, perhaps with limited SEO experience, expressed outrage that Microsoft would alter (one post used the word “falsify”) a webmaster’s chosen search result titles.

The uproar seems to rather ill conceived to say the least. Search engines have for years chosen search result titles from directories such as DMOZ rather than from a page’s <title> tag.

Eventually search engines began to support specific meta tags, e.g. noodp and noydir, giving site owners control over alternative title use. Even if this precedent didn’t exist, search engines regularly create their own result summaries. While Google will sometimes use a page’s specified meta description as the search result snippet, this behavior itself is relatively recent.

While SEO practitioners can and should work to craft enticing search results (title, description and URL), the search engines has always had the last word and this hasn’t changed. We might actually find Bing’s title rewriting to yield greater click-through – but this remains to be seen. What would be nice would be a meta robots tag allowing a webmaster to disable title rewriting. Ideally this would be supported in the Bing webmaster console as a site wide option and as a X-Robots-Tag http header as well.

Bing crawler

Bing has also announced an update to their search crawling system, bumping the bot version from 1.1 to 2.0b for now, e.g. msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Should you use a reporting tool to check search engine crawling depth and frequency, you might want to insure you haven’t hard-coded the bot version number.

Bing local personalization

In some markets, Bing personalizes local search results based on user IP. Go to Extras (upper right part of screen) → preferences. You might see “Current location”, filled in with the location Bing has detected.

You can override this by specifying a Zip/Post code or City and State/Province code. This functionality is not available for all geographies. I currently see it for the US and Italy but I don’t see it for Ireland nor for Portugal. If you change any of Bing’s preferences, the location information will be stored in a cookie, SRCHHPGUSR, in a form similar to LOC=LAT%3d43.78|LON%3d11.25|DISP%3dFirenze%2c%20Toscana|. This seems to imply that you can change location information by supplying decimal values of Latitude and Longitude in a URL parameter LOC. I was unable to get this to work however.

Bing’s API allows for disabling location inferring, Options=DisableLocationDetection. There may be a similar URL option as well.

While Google allows users to specify their location in their Google account, this requires users to give up their privacy by associating their name with their location and searches. Bing does not required users to log in. On this front Bing clearly has better privacy protections than Google.

View the Bing version for your country of choice

I found myself looking at the Portuguese version of Bing when it was launched – I was in Portugal. Bing defaults the country version a first time user sees based on their IP. This can be overridden by appending cc=<two character country code> to the bing query URL, e.g. http://www.bing.com/?cc=us. Alternatively, you can set Bing’s “Market” by selecting from a list or appending setmkt=<language-COUNTRY>, e.g. http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=de-CH, to the Bing URL. See the Bing developer API documentation for a full listing of supported values. The interface language can be changed as well by using &setlang=<language-COUNTRY>.

Bing does have explicit personalization options to specify pages from a country, e.g. +loc:<country code> and page language, e.g. +language:<language code>. Thus, you can limit your search results to Italian from Switzerland by adding +loc%3ACH+language%3Ait to the keywords in the query URL.

Why the web needs Microsoft – with a few caveats

Refreshingly, Bing’s video offerings aren’t just limited to Google’s YouTube, one area where Google has a very clear unresolved conflict of interest. This is one illustration of why the web, with some caveats, really needs Microsoft to become a credible player in internet search.

Microsoft’s difficult relationship with the web

Unfortunately, Microsoft has a serious credibility problem on the web. After Netscape’s demise (no doubt Microsoft’s “free” browser bundled with new Windows installations didn’t help sales), Microsoft stopped innovating their web browser. IE version 6, child of the browser wars rather than the web standards movement, was released in 2001. The world had to wait 5 years before the next IE version would see the light of day, severely hindering web standards adoption and decent css support. 5 years is a long time in any time frame, never mind Internet time.

IE’s cross platform support, TrueType fonts, winmail.dat

At the height of the browser wars, Microsoft offered cross platform versions of IE for Unix and Mac. Both versions have since disappeared. Microsoft also supported the web by contributing TrueType fonts, which then disappeared.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has disregarded the whole internet ecosystem at times, no better exemplified by the winmail.dat attachment files Microsoft merrily emails across the Internet despite the fact no one else can read them. How much time have we lost on this problem?

Silverlight cross-platform compatible? Balderdash.

The arrows in the lower right hand corner of Bing’s US version will apparently change the background photo. Too bad Bing is using Microsoft’s flash substitute, Silverlight, to do this. Microsoft touts Silverlight as a cross platform solution – poppycock!

Silverlight is not available for Linux nor is there an equivalent available. Novell’s tepid efforts called Moonlight have yet to produce up-to-date versions for Linux nor does it appear that this will change. Indeed, Moonlight won’t even install in the current release version (3.5) of Firefox, probably the most used browser on Linux. Despite the “support” of two large corporations on paper, in reality no one seems to care if Linux users can actually view current Silverlight websites. The net result is that websites using any version of Silverlight break, now. Message to Microsoft: I really wish you well with Bing, but please drop the Silverlight stuff. or get serious about cross platform support.

Not a Microsoft rant, per se

At the risk of digressing too much, I need to be clear that my considerations regarding Microsoft and the web should not be misconstrued. I am the proud owner of many Microsoft products, particularly their mice and keyboards. I have used MS Money for many years, although now they have abandoned it, I need to find a way to extract my full payee data, which doesn’t seem possible… but that is another issue for another day.

What the Microsoft on the web experience really teaches us

Even if it is rather easy to love Google, it is exactly the experience with Microsoft which demonstrates why we want to avoid finding one company effectively controlling access to the web through their dominant position in search.

Yes, Google is a great company. Google has been truly innovative, just look at what they’ve done with machine translation over the last year or so. Yet any site owner who has had their site banned in Google realizes Google’s court of appeal doesn’t hold public hearings. For many sites, once you’re invisible in Google, you’re invisible on the web to all intents and purposes.

There is of course one risk with Microsoft’s search ascendency. We could end up with a Google-Microsoft duopoly, especially if Microsoft does buy Yahoo! and manage to keep Yahoo! traffic, not necessarily a given. I’m not so sure what advantages would really accrue from a duopoly. I’d really prefer to see multiple quality search engines in most markets.

Further Bing exploration

The Bing team has done a great job so far and I strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with what they are doing even if Bing doesn’t yet have much search market share in your home market. The best way to explore Bing’s new features is by reviewing the press and webmaster documentation cited at the beginning of this article and test them using the US version of Bing.

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