Since Bing is a search (ahem, I mean “decision”) engine, I would assume that the rest of the website, other than the search, would be SEO optimized (Search Engine Optimization). It hosts blogs and forums, and I would assume Microsoft would want them to be indexed by Google and Yahoo. After all, more traffic to the Bing site should be a good thing. However, it seems that the “Bing Community” sections of http://bing.com are lacking when it comes to SEO.

Below are some links to blog and forum posts with examples of how the Bing Community, a sub-section of Bing, is lacking when it comes to SEO.

Blog Post: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/maps/archive/2010/08/02/king-of-bing-maps-applications-are-go.aspx

• The page Title is “Bing Community,” instead of the actual title of the blog post. If you search either Google or Bing the title of the page that shows in the search results is “Bing Community,” which does not represent the page content what so ever. As a result many users would just gloss over those results, assuming they are irrelevant. What the page Title should be is the full title of the blog post.
• The page source contains 2

  (header) tags. If a page has an

  tag, search engines will use that to help detect what the main title of the page content is. By having 2

  tags, the page will therefore “confuse” the search engines causing them to not be able to figure out what the main title of the page content is. The 2

  ’s in this blog post contain the text “Community” and “King of Bing Maps: Who Shall Be King?”</li> </ul> Forum Post: http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/651827.aspx

  • The same two issues for blog posts are also there for forums posts.

  Other Issues with the Bing Community website that may or may not be related to SEO:

  • The html markup of the page includes a tag to include a “/community/favicon.ico” image. However, the image linked to does not exists and requesting it returns a 404 (Page Not Found) error page.
  • One usability issue with viewing blogs on the Bing Community website is that you cannot click the “Blogs” tab at the top of the page to view the list of blogs hosted there. Instead you must click “Community,” then click the “Blogs” tab on that page to view the list of blogs hosted on the Bing Community website. This is very Un-Intuitive.

  I understand that most people, developers and website administrators may not be aware of these simple SEO mistakes that are commonly missed. I would expect Microsoft and Bing to get these things right, but apparently even they have troubles with SEO, which is very odd since they are in charge of one of the most used search engines. Anyway, I hope that by pointing these coupe items out will help others make their websites more SEO friendly, and get them higher search engine rankings and increased website traffic. Also, I am definitely not claiming to be an SEO expert. If you have anything to add, on either the SEO of my blog or the Bing Community website, please post a comment. I am really interested to hear any comments you may have.