Bing SEO Analysis: A Comparison with Google Ranking Factors - Link Analysis: Comparison of Off-site Related Factors

Google is known to rely strongly on link analysis and quality of links. Let's find out if this is true with the Bing search engine.

Below is the raw comparison in terms of inbound anchor text "quantity" and "percentages."

You might noticed that php-developer.org performs strongly in terms of quantity and percentages of anchor text containing the targeted keyword.  

In terms of raw quantity of links containing the targeted anchor text (whether coming from the same or unique domains), php-developer.org has an estimated 390 links, while addonsolutions.com has only 33.  

How about the quality of these links? Note that the above comparison is plain quantity, and does not measure the quality of those links.  

Quality of links in Google is defined based on two criteria: links coming from relevant/authoritative domains, and links that are editorially given and do not look sponsored or manipulated.  

If we are going to compute quality as:  

Quality (total score) = back linking domain relevance x link location  

The link location can be used to determine the quality of the links, as to whether it looks editorially given or sponsored/manipulated.  

For example, if the link appears within the text content, it appears to be editorially given, while the links that appear in the footer section do not; instead, they look sponsored or manipulated. The latter is also true with links appearing as an image or somewhere else (not in the content/body text), such as in a blogroll.  

Links appearing in directories, forums and comment posts of course appear to be less editorially given/important than those that appear as part of pure content or an article. 

For the purpose of analyzing the quality of links, considering the criteria explained above, the following rating system is formulated for link location:  

1 point - link appears in footer or other portion of the web page (not in the body).

2 points - link appears in a blog roll or special resource section of the website and not in the content.

4 points - links appear in the content /article  

Domain relevance rating system:  

1 point - no relevance at all to the targeted website.

2 point - medium relevance, not direct (for example, if back links are from SEO websites pointing to PHP websites), or not directly related but somehow connected to each other.

4 points - links coming from a directly relevant website. (PHP to PHP-based websites)  

Below is the result of analysis of the two websites using the above ratings:

It is clear why addonsolutions.com ranks highly in Google. It has higher quality inbound links than php-developer.org using above criteria.  

Even though php-developer.org has the advantage in terms of quantity, quality is even more important when it comes to ranking in Google.  

Recommendation:  

Based on the data and analysis provided above, to rank in Bing, you need more links using the targeted keywords in anchor text. The more exact, the greater will be the impact. You will need to concentrate on getting a high percentage of links that contain the targeted keywords in the anchor text.

Note that following the above approach will not necessarily give you a high ranking in Google. As you can see, these factors are not considered "important" in Google link analysis, because Google's algorithm focuses heavily on the relevance, location and authority factors of the linking domain, and not just on the number of links.  

Bing's algorithm may evolve to further improve its search results, so this analysis and these recommendations may not be applicable in the future.