Bing vs Google

• Bing does not currently allow video or news xml sitemaps. Update from after show: I also cant find evidence of support for image sitemaps at Bing; anyone know otherwise? Reference link.


• Bings results seem to have more immediate content with local connotations that can be acted upon without leaving the page. i.e. movie names may bring up full show times for all local theatres based on your location. Another example showed typing in the word snow would show snow reports for local mountains. The same goes for weather forecasts which Google has similar results for but only shows one source vs a scattering of weather sources for a local area.


• Sitelinks can be edited in Google but not Bing.

• The Backlinks report on Bing Webmaster Tools offers a list of links pointing to your site and the value of those links (although IMO the ranking system is weak). Also you can only download the first 1000 results.


• News Comparison: Google you can submit your news site for review and you can submit the news sitemap for Google to spider. This cannot be done with Bing; you can only submit your news site for consideration by emailing (rather regularly) the following email address, bns@microsoft.com, and you also have to ensure you have an RSS feed for content.


• You can submit your ecommerce feeds to Google for free but Bing offers paid only submissions (FYI. Bing cashback is finishing in July)

What Bing Offers and Google Doesnt

• Bing allows social sharing for some results via search results! You can send to Facebook, Twitter and Email. IMPORTANT NOTE: the link you tweet or FBook will link back to Bings results vs. the site of the person that posted the content. It is worth keeping an eye on even though it doesnt help in SEO yet.


• Bing offers document preview which is similar to Ask.coms system. LOL: Bing features video that can play inline within the previews " but only YouTube LOL! You can control this by knowing how In order to have some influence over the document preview that you see on Bing, make sure to consider that the information is compiled from the following information in order: H1 tag (if it does not match the title tag), first paragraph of information (or paragraph and a half), then it will take the contact info (address, phone, and email) from the page if it is available.


• Bing allows you to block previews of your page by adding the following line: <meta name=msnbot, content=nopreview> to the page. Or you can add this to your robots.txt file to block the preview for all pages: x-robots-tag:nopreview

A special thank you goes out to Janet Driscoll-Miller who provided a  presentation at SMX Advanced which was the source of much of this excellent compare & contrast information.

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