White Hat Link Building According to Bing
By Anna Johnson on December 2nd, 2009Bing’s Rick DeJarnette recently posted a great article advising Internet marketers and search engine optimizers on link building from Bing’s perspective. Actually, the principles are probably universal to Google and other search engines, and provide a neat guide to ‘white hat link building’.
Essentially, Bing’s policy on link building is that it is less concerned about the techniques used to create links than the intention behind those techniques. Having said that, DeJarnette also acknowledges that the choice of techniques can indicate the underlying intentions, which in turn can affect a website’s ranking in Bing.
Specifically, DeJarnette says that SEO techniques oriented towards helping users will help a site rank higher than techniques aimed at influencing the search engine crawlers. What techniques help users? Those related to creating content: “Content. Good, original, text-based content.”
Echoing what Google search engine reps such as Matt Cutts have said on numerous occasions, DeJarnette says that:
“Providing high-quality content on your pages is the single most important thing you can do to attract inbound links. If your content is unique and useful to people, your site will naturally attract visitors and, as a result, automatically get good links to your site. By focusing on great content, over time, your site will naturally acquire those coveted inbound links.”
Meanwhile, DeJarnette also indicates that Bing, like Google, distinguishes between links based on the relevance and authority of their source.
Firstly, the site providing the link must be topically relevant to your site. Bing evaluates such relevance based on crawling the content of the sites linking to your site, as well the content of your site. If there’s a “clear disconnect, the value of that inbound link is significantly diminished, if not completely disregarded.”
Secondly, the most valuable links will come from the most authoritative sites in your industry or area. DeJarnette defines authoritative sites as those which “possess great content, that have a history in their space, that have earned tons of relevant, inbound links.”
Helpfully, you can use the Bing Webmaster Center Backlinks tool to see who is linking to your site and how authoritative Bing considers each site to be.
As you might expect, Bing is on the outlook for techniques aimed at search engine manipulation. When Bing detects probable manipulation, it assigns a spam rank factor to the site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction.
A high spam rating can lead Bing to penalize the site with a lowered rank. Serious and persistent attempts to manipulate the ranking of a site can lead Bing to temporarily or permanently purge the site from its index.
Some examples of unnatural activity noted by DeJarnette include where:
The number of inbound links increases dramatically in a short amount of time.
- A lot of inbound links come from irrelevant blog comments and/or websites.
- There are hidden links on your webpages.
- Inbound links come from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known ‘bad neighborhoods’.
- The site links out to known ‘web spam’ sites.
So that’s the kind of thing to avoid doing… but what should you be doing to accelerate your white hat link building efforts?
See today’s Kikabink Lab article for 10 Link Building Tips from Bing…
