Twitter & Facebook Influence SEO According To Google & Bing

I am way behind today, but wanted to point you quickly to this post by Rand Fishkin in which he covers that both Bing and Google have confirmed via Danny Sullivan) that indeed, links shared through Twitter and Facebook do in fact have a direct impact on rankings. As you know I have been a big fan of using Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for some time now and I suggest you make it a point to include them more going forward into 2011 once this holiday season is completed. Good stuff in that post.

Exact Match Domains To Be Penalized Soon?

What a great post today by Rand Fishin ON SEO Moz as he addresses the question of if exact domain matches are too powerful and if they will be penalized in the future. Some experts believe that Google is rewarding sites too much right now for exact domain matches and believe you could indeed see a shift in the next 6 months. Right now it seems to be highly educated guesses on this, but owning quite a bit of exact domain name matches, I will be watching a little more closer than normal starting around the 1st of the year. My view is that Google should be able to take other on page things into consideration instead of just throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak. The best way to combat this is too build sites that do not suck and hopefully you and I have been doing it all along. Sure I have some more spammy than others and will get around to upgrading the quality as I get back around to them. Some great comments in that post as well and I highly suggest chiming in there as well to add to the conversation. Great post as usual by Rand.

Yahoo Says Better Be Optimized For Bing Soon

Webmaster Magazine reported that search engine Yahoo released an update to advertisers on Friday to announce that they will start serving organic search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine starting in August or September. They advised that if you rely heavily on organic search engine traffic from the current Yahoo engine, you need to make sure you are now optimized for Bing instead. In another post, they give 5 steps on how to be Bing ready. The one that jumps out is the Bing Webmaster Tools as I know several webmasters have never even explored them before. SEO Book has an older post on Bing SEO strategies as well worth browsing. Overall, I suggest not going over board on any of this. Making sure you register with Bing tools and basic optimization as if you were ranking for Google should be the priority. Trying to make adjustments for each search engine will drive you crazy. Common sense really should be at the forefront. At least now there are really just 2 search engines to worry about instead of three.

Get Indexed In Bing Faster?

I purposefully waited a while on a somewhat newer site to see if Bing would index it within 90 days of launch with numerous high quality backlinks. After 90 days the site had been visited by the bot, but not indexed. I wanted to try the Bing site submission page along with their BING webmaster tools section to see if it would get it indexed quickly or not. After 48 hours of doing both, the front page of the said site is indexed. I did submit the xml sitemap as part of the process just so you know. OK, now. Could it have been a coincidence? Absolutely, I did see another crawler, but can not rule out that the site just so happened to be sceduled to be indexed on that day. I will tell you though, that I see no harm in doing this as soon as your site is ready for indexing. I also used the meta tag process for verification in the header. I will get around soon to trying this on another site and see if it can be accomplished in the same time frame. While Google is my primary source for all my sites traffic, I never turn my nose up at other search engines and their traffic. free targeted traffic, is free targeted traffic.

Bing Updates Webmaster FAQs

Bing certainly is carving out a little bit bigger hole into the share of search engine traffic. They are a ways away from over taking Google, but it seems their following is gaining steam. I have found myself Binging it a few more times as of late as well. I was really amazed that Google also showed up on Super Bowl Sunday with a commercial. Seems they may be feeling a little heat as well. Competition makes everyone better in my opinion.

Bing announced they have revised their Webmaster frequently asked questions into a 28 page PDF document. The document can be downloaded and read right here. It consist of 82 detailed questions and answers and is segmented into 12 separate categories.

Rand Fishkin Interviews Bing Reps

Well, I have the flu and been on my back most of the day in and out of consciousness. So in lieu of a meaningful post I had planned, I give you the Whiteboard Friday from SEOMoz.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz has posted an interview with with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing at the Microsoft headquarters. Rand gets their insights on the search landscape and what we can expect from Bing going forward. Make sure to visit the link above as well to some neat tools Bing has as well.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Interview: The Bing Team from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Bahoo Or Ying? How This Affects You!

If you have not heard by now, Yahoo and Microsoft have teamed up with one another web search wise. Both will still be separate sites, but in short, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will handle the premium search advertisers. Bing will be the algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo.

So what does this all mean? Basically, if you are ranking well already in Bing, you are probably on the right track. If you rank better in Yahoo than Bing, you might have some worries. Yahoo is still very manipulative from an SEO standpoint whereas Bing is improving. While it may take some time for Bing algorithm to get implemented into Yahoo, you should probably start learning more about how sites are ranking in Bing.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Site Explorer offered by Yahoo. It is a great tool to use to find out who is linking to who. You can rest assure that something will come out to replace it. Might be third party, might be something run by Bing. Jury is still out on that.

All in all both Google and the new Ying or Bahoo want to return the most relative result to the surfer. If you build sites that fill needs and answer the surfers needs, you will survive. Continue to work on quality backlinks and build sites others will want to link to and all should be well.

For a much deeper look at this, there is a great post today on SEOMoz by Rand Fishkin that breaks this down much further than I can. all in all, I am not to worried about and if you are building sites the right way, you should sleep well also.