The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

Unless you’ve had your head in the SEO sand, you know that there’s a new search engine to reckon with. It’s not really new. Bing is just MSN Live revamped in a very good way. And the new kid on the block is getting market share. Will it usurp Google’s top spot? Not likely, at least for a very long time, but you just never know. Who ever heard of Google before 1998, right?

So, Bing released a new article in its Community: Link Building for Smart Webmasters which talks about natural, organic link building. Hmm… they actually could be Google clones.

We know the right ways: article marketing, blog commenting (not spamming), press releases, yadda, yadda. But they also mention that reciprocal linking is cool… IF you’re linking to sites in your niche. Linking to sites with no relation to what you’re doing won’t help you and in some instances can actually hurt.

So, let’s focus on stuff that will cause you harm:

• Getting a ton on inbound links in a big, fat hurry. Search engines are really smart, remember? They know when you’re doing things that they don’t approve of and you’ll definitely pay for those untoward advances in your prestige.

• A bunch of links coming from sites that have no correlation to what your niche is. If you have a few links like this, no big deal, but if you have a ton of them, you may need to clean house and ask webmasters to remove their links to you or go and nuke some forum posts or other links yourself.

• Hidden links in your pages. Anything hidden really pisses spiders off. Just don’t do it. Words, links, letters… anything that your viewers can’t see is not good.

• Paid links. Bing apparently hates paid links coming into your site and they don’t want you having incoming links from bad neighborhoods or link farms. But, they don’t mention anything about paid links going out. I’d still stay away from that. I’ve been suffering page rank-itis just from having ONE crummy paid link on my site. The advertiser finally decided to end the association and I quickly closed my account with Text Link Ads. Let’s see if Google will pat me on the head now for being a better girl.

• Linking out to known spam sites. Here’s where it’s tricky. If you’re approving every comment that comes into your blog just to show comments… think again. If you’re approving spam links, the search engines won’t like it at all. Set your blog to allow comment moderation. It’s the only way you can protect yourself from these issues, and don’t approve any comments from sites that are crappy, meaning all they do is scrape post titles or snippets of your posts for their own blogs and plop a bunch of AdSense ads or other marketing on them. Pffft!  My content doesn’t roll that way.

Linking is still important, but getting natural one-way links from unique content or other quality sites linking to you is the best way to boost your SEO rankings. Anything else is just wasted effort and time poorly spent.

Technorati Tags: seo, bing, google, search engine optimization

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1. Tweets that mention ovblogger : SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog » Blog Archive » SEO: Bing Talks Linking -- Topsy.com
   December 1st, 2009 at 6:25 pm #

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pat Marcello, Pat Marcello. Pat Marcello said: New blog post:: SEO: Bing Talks Linking http://ovblogger.com/1725/seo-bing-talks-linking/ [...]

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