We have seen a lot of updates, previously Google updated its webmaster Guidelines last October 2 and recently Bing had published its Webmaster guidelines, this truly means a progressive campaign in giving a quality and relevant search results.
Google and Bing are major search engines used widely by internet users. Both are at par with each other in many contexts. Both aims to provide objective, relevant and organic results to search queries. Both have different algorithms and provide different updates from time to time.
In serving the internet users with quality information, both search engines also make developments on how their search engine spiders crawl for links, contents, and other factors by which ranking will depend on. Guidelines from webmasters are sometimes overlapping, yet one must figure out how it is to rank well in both search engines, independently.
Highlighted Similarities in Both Webmaster Guidelines
Website and its Content– it all stars with creating your website. Both Google and Bing have its guidelines of how a website should be set up to make it valuable and user friendly.
Google and Bing agrees that content should be fresh, unique and informative. Websites should be made for the sake of the user and not for rankings alone. Major search engines including Yahoo must have a head to head nod in terms of making the website content less of ads, no too many links, no keywords stuffing and rich user experience.
In general terms, Google and Bing are at par in terms of content. The difference lies on the details of information about it. Google releases Panda updates almost every month. The battle against low quality content is much wider, stricter and vivid with Google’s journey towards giving high quality results to users.
Links– your website should be seen in other relevant websites. It will drive traffic and will boost rankings. Google employs Penguin that fights for inorganic links. On the other hand Bing also incorporated punishment for “spamming”. Same in essence, both search engines fight for link farming and irrelevant, unnatural and low quality links. Not following the guidelines will result to having penalized website and being kicked out of good rankings.
Website Content and Links are essential in getting good rankings yet you need to consider other key points which are shown below:
Other Important Guidelines from Google and Bing Updates
Cloaking
It is a practice deceiving search engines by which another version of the page is shown to the search engine crawlers and a different one to users. Both engines prevent the use of this unethical technique as it will also deceive users.
Link Schemes
Google is very active in fighting link schemes or link farms. For Bing and Google, it increases the quantity of links but sources are of low quality. Bing may have not included it in their updates but to Google it includes buying or page ranks, excessive link exchanging, and linking to low quality websites. It also includes getting links from widgets and forum comments and signatures.
Social Media Schemes
Google and Bing must have same way of fighting spammers. However, Bing emphasized more on Social Media schemes by which the use of Social media sites such as twitter, Facebook, and G+ have been used. Auto follows in twitter is just the same as link farms, in which the link created have deprecated values. Bing emphasizes on true social media interaction. Dummy accounts do no good for your website.
The Use of Redirects
Bing updates wanted webmasters to use the normal 301 directs rather than presetting a time interval before making the page direct to another page. Google as well doesn’t like the idea of being redirected to another page for a certain period of time as it will deceive the users of the actual information provided by the results of their queries. When 301 redirects is the best way to moving a site, you can also Javascript if access to server is not available.
Duplicate Content
Both engines work hard fighting for low content so much with duplicate ones. In Bing the rel=”nofollow” element can be used but just a secondary solution to the problem. In line with this Google kicks of auto-generated content. These are texts generated by bots, or comes from scraping RSS feeds. Any texts that are published with human review will be tagged as low or duplicate content.
Bing’s guidelines are spoken in general terms. Unlike Google that creates a detailed information of how things go well in its processes. Aside from listed above, Google wanted to eliminate keyword stuffing (was not emphasized by Bing), hidden text or links. Irrelevant keywords, abuse of rich snippets, and automated queries.
Somehow, both search engines work for a common goal. Yet the one who strive hard for the benefit of users is Google. It makes sense and justice since Google is considered to be more trustworthy search engine than any other else.
For more information check the latest Webmaster Guidelines of Bing.
