Bing Search Algorithm: What Are The Top Ranking Factors & How it Works?
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Marketers are always curious about the behind-the-scenes of search engines. Understanding the core ranking algorithms and aligning your website with them can improve your overall SEO strategy.
Despite Microsoft Bing being a less popular search engine, optimizing for it can help you get some extra clicks every month. It powers plenty of other services, such as Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Alexa, and Siri. Making your website Bing-friendly can also help you grab bonus clicks from these other search services.
In this post, we are going to drill down into the Bing Search Algorithm and find the top ranking ranking factors in 2023. 😃
What’s Covered?
- What is Bing Search Algorithm?
- How Bing Ranks Your Content?
- Top 8 Bing Ranking Factors
- Bing’s Whole Page Algorithm
- Frequently Asked Questions Related to Bing Search Algorithm
- Key Takeaways to Rank High on Bing
First, let’s understand what actually does Bing search algorithm mean.
What is Bing Search Algorithm?
Microsoft Bing uses a complex algorithm to decide the rank of web pages for a specific search query. It takes many factors into consideration, i.e. user’s search intent, content relevancy, quality, etc. (More on that later) The chief aim is to provide the best possible search result to the user.
Bing keeps updating its algorithm to be a more useful search engine for users.
The Bing ranking process looks like Crawling → Indexing → Ranking
Bing bots or crawlers regularly crawl old and new web pages through links and sitemaps and store them in its database, known as an index. Now, for any search query, Bing will find the best web pages matches from its index, and rankings them according to different factors.
Let’s go through the official Bing Webmaster Guidelines to find out more about the ranking process.
How Bing Ranks Your Content?
Bing uses a complex algorithm to rank web pages. It uses machine learning to identify the best results out of trillions of web pages, which is trained on data labeled by humans.
Here is an overview of the parameters Bing uses to rank web pages:
- Relevance: Bing matches the user query to the content of the web page. Strong signals include exact match phrases, backlink anchor texts with keywords, usage of synonyms and abbreviations, etc.
- Quality & Credibility: This one is quite similar to Google’s E-E-A-T principle. User experience, clear information about the ownership, domain reputation, citations & references, complete topic coverage, and backlinks act as strong signals for higher Bing rankings.
- User engagement: Bing asks for direct feedback from the users on the SERPs about the search results, which is used to evaluate the pages. The user interaction metrics such as click-thru rate and time spent on the page are also used to decide the ranking of a page on Bing.
- Freshness: Recently updated or published web pages are likelier to rank above the older ones.
- Location: The location of the user, server, and other visitors strongly impacts the rankings.
- Page load time: Just like Google’s Core Web Vitals, Bing also prioritizes fast-loading pages for ranking.
The above ranking parameters provide just an overview of the Bing ranking algorithm. Now, let’s explore each of the possible ranking factors.
Top 8 Bing Ranking Factors
Bing search algorithm takes many factors into consideration for ranking web pages. The influence of these factors is not equal, and may also vary from query to query.
Microsoft does not openly disclose the core Bing ranking factors.
In fact, no search engine would ever do that!
We built a general idea of the possible Bing search ranking factors based on the webmaster guidelines.
Here are some of the top possible ranking factors of the Bing search engine:
1. Content Quality
Bing search algorithm is designed to find the best web page and show it to the users. Here, the quality of the content plays a crucial role.
The sub-factors signaling high-quality content are:
- Relevancy
- Factual accuracy
- Uniqueness
- Comprehensiveness
- Readability
References and links to other authentic sites from a page are also a good signal and help in establishing trust & credibility.
2. Keywords’ Usage
In the official Bing webmaster guidelines, Bing clarifies it looks for exact-match phrases, synonyms, and abbreviations to match the relevancy of the page with the search term.
Interestingly, the Bing algorithm focuses more on exact-match keywords than Google. It also offers a native keyword research tool to find trending terms and their search volume.
The main areas to use the keywords are:
- Title
- Meta description
- H1, H2, H3… tags
- Image ALT attributes
- Body Content
The title & meta description of a webpage, present inside <head>, provide a general overview of the web page to the crawlers.
It is also important to keep the length of the meta description optimum, i.e. under 160 characters. You can find a list of related issues from the Bing Webmaster tools.
Similarly, the presence of keywords and related terms in the H1, H2, H3… headings, and the body content is also a strong relevancy signal. Plus, if you have a keyword in your domain name.
Also Read: Best SEO Keyword Rank Tracker Tools
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are considered to be signals of authority or credibility by search engines. Not the most important ranking factor, but backlinks are still essential for ranking on Bing.
Interesting Observation: Bing will deindex a page if it has no backlinks.
Bing search algorithm considers ‘phrases used in links referring to the page’ as a relevancy factor, which means backlinks with keyword-rich anchor texts. Links from .edu, .org, and .gov domains are most-effective for ranking on Bing.
In addition to this, the Bing search engine algorithm focuses more on domain authority than page authority. Therefore, the overall backlink profile of a domain is more important than the backlinks to a specific page.
4. Domain Age
Not clearly a Bing ranking factor, but new domains are hard to rank on Bing than on Google. This is because old domains are considered credible and more authentic than new ones.
5. Social Signals
Your social media presence can significantly influence your search engine rankings on Bing. This is officially confirmed.
Bing says, “Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence.”
The webmaster guidelines mention that social media profiles with # of Followers > # of Following have more influence on the rankings.
For example:
Meetanshi’s official Twitter account has almost 800 followers and it follows only 2 accounts. It is a signal of high authority for the Bing search engine algorithm.
Furthermore, the number of user interactions, such as comments, likes, and shares on social media posts may also influence Bing search rankings, as they serve as a signal of credibility.
6. Location
Location is another ranking factor used by the Bing search algorithm.
The location of the searcher, the hosting server of the webpage, the language, and that of other visitors impact the rankings.
Bing does not clarify much on this, but this may hold more significance for the local queries. For example, for the search query “best cms for indian businesses” the Bing search algorithm is likely to choose web pages from servers hosted in the Indian region.
But just like I mentioned earlier, these are just assumptions!
7. Click-thru Rate
Bing search algorithm is trained to analyze the user interaction with the web pages on its SERPs. The click-thru rate and number of users bounced back from a specific page are used to measure the overall usefulness of a result.
The logic is simple here—if more users are clicking on a specific result, and staying on the page for a longer time, then the result is highly useful. Its inverse is also true—if a high number of users are bouncing back to Bing SERP from a page and clicking on other results or reformulating their query, then the page is of low quality.
This ranking factor ultimately points towards the #1 Content Quality.
8. User Experience
Search engines do not want to disappoint their users. Therefore, only the pages following the user experience best practices are shown on the top.
Bing algorithm considers page speed as one of the ranking factors.
Unlike Google’s PageSpeed Insights, there is no specific threshold for the optimum loading speed for Bing SEO. Therefore, you can take help from third-party website speed test tools.
In addition to this, the Bing search algorithm also considers mobile-friendliness one of the factors. According to Bing, “Making pages mobile-friendly increases user engagement on mobile devices. It can also help you rank better in Bing search results on mobile devices.”
You can use Bing’s mobile friendliness tool for testing your website.
Bing’s Whole Page Algorithm
In addition to the Bing ranking algorithm, there is also a Whole Page Algorithm, which organizes the elements on the SERP page before displaying it.
Jason Barnard from Search Engine Journal, interviewed Nathan Chalmers, a Program Manager for Bing’s Search Relevance Team, and came out with this concept.
Basically, it is the algorithm that decides the different types of rich elements/candidate sets that appear on the SERPs, in addition to the classic blue links. Different types of candidate sets bid for a place on the SERP, which are selected if they bring more value to the users.
In a nutshell, Bing’s whole page algorithm decides the types of extra-rich features and selects the most useful results to best match the search intent.
Related Read: Microsoft Advertising 2023
Frequently Asked Questions Related to Bing Search Algorithm
Does Bing employ human search quality raters?
Ans. Yes, Bing has human search quality raters that manually rate a web page on several factors. This was confirmed by Bing’s spokesperson in 2012.
Is it easier to rank on Bing?
Ans. In some cases, it can be easier to rank on Bing as compared to Google, because of low competition. However, if your domain is brand new, it can take more time to rank on Bing.
What are the most important Bing ranking factors?
Ans. Bing algorithm uses a number of factors to rank web pages. Top Bing ranking factors are discussed above in the article.
Key Takeaways to Rank High on Bing
Bing search algorithm uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to decide the ranking of web pages through multiple factors. The Bing ranking factors can be useful to optimize web pages to rank high on the search engine. The key takeaways to rank high on Bing are:
- Focus on user experience
- Optimize content for search intent
- Establish credibility & authority
Bing Webmaster Tools is a useful platform to keep track of your site’s SEO health. You can use it to regularly generate SEO reports, find issues, and a lot more. 🙂
We are offering a FREE SEO Audit to help you find what’s holding you back from success. Request a FREE SEO Audit Now!
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