EQUTE — The Bing Webmaster Center Team gave some pointers on link building for the Bing search engine.

Rick DeJarnette, of the Bing Webmaster Center, said in a blog post . He runs down the basics of link building and says the key to good search rankings is about the same as Google’s.

DeJarnette ran the gamut saying content is king, leverage authority sites, good inbound links — nothing new. He did go into what makes Bing take a second glance. While he says link building is OK (read necessary) he said they must be helpful to searchers.

Bing’s position on link building is straightforward - we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent. Allow me to explain.
Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Using hidden links in your pages

Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web

Linking out to known web spam sites

When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Bing offered a lot of tips that will help, but it’s nothing a seasoned SEO expert wouldn’t know by working with Google. These tips do, however, give good basics for working with Bing.

EQUTE — John McCarthy has an interesting article over at Adotas, and it makes one think about what SEO has become — a buzzword for cheap traffic.

McCarthy provides an interesting anecdote about a client of his who sought to use SEO to drive more leads to his technology company. A few competitors said they were getting good results with organic SEO, so he thought of trying it himself. He hired McCarthy and asked him to get the SEO train going.

But instead of leading him on with false promises, McCarthy told his client that SEO was not right because of the sparse content on his site and the long road to organic rankings.

So when should marketers tell their clients (or themselves) to try something else?

Simple, when time and money is of the essence and there is nothing for the search spiders to crawl.

Unless you or a client is prepared for a long wait for results, paid search rankings are a much better way to get things moving — while getting the SEO train moving as well, McCarthy said.

Ideally, sites are created and build up SEO either naturally or by design, but many sites are simply better designed for paid search. But with SEO becoming the buzzword it is, there is a slew of people looking to capitalize with little investment in the down economy. Site owners and business owners should think about whether or not they really need SEO help. With some examination, many people will find that SEO isn’t worth the money, and paid search or other tactics could get them over the recession hump without all the mess.

EQUTE — John McCarthy has an interesting case study over at Adotas about a company that was about to get hit with an “SEO bomb.”

McCarthy said that he got a call from a public relations agency at the end of the day Friday, and had to deliver them some bad news.

The agency told him that a very negative and very true story about fraud at a local company was about to hit the local press — they needed some SEO reputation management immediately.

The public relations agency asked how fast we could implement an SEO reputation management campaign to suppress the pending negative news stories in the search engines. I responded that technically we could start today but the reality is it was too late – as the damage was already done.
– McCarthy wrote

He said all they could do now was try to push the bad press down far enough that people wouldn’t see it right away.

He wrote about creating a three-tiered approach to getting the company ranked high in search engines.

• Tier 1 consists of the company’s own web sites and content. These would be SEO optimized like none other with a keyword pushing and link building campaign. Ideally, these sites would be easy to get to the top spots on Google since the company has complete control over the properties.
• Tier 2 consists of third parties that paint the company in a positive light. This might consist of past press, TV web site write-ups, press releases, etc. These would be more difficult to rank since the SEO optimizers wouldn’t have control over the content, but they could still be part of a link building campaign and could be well placed in the organic rankings.
• Tier 3 consists of Web assets that don’t yet exist. These basically are used as filler to fill in the top 10 on Google or Yahoo (Bing). These are just as easy as Tier 1 sites to optimize, but there is significant work just getting it on the Internet and indexed.

McCarthy’s example had three client-owned sites and five positive third-party sites; which meant that they had to create two Tier 3 sites/articles to fill out the rankings.

His first step was to take inventory of the Web assets, second was optimizing. But the public relations company was surprised how long it would take.

“Months?” cried out the representative from the public relations agency.
“Yes, months,” I responded. “Depending upon the number and intensity of the negative mentions.”
“Worse yet,” I stated “it will be expensive. My team will need to drop what they are doing today and spend the weekend performing the inventory analysis. Once they find positive mention assets, they need to immediately start promoting those assets while simultaneously developing the actual SEO reputation management campaign in parallel.”

McCarthy said it would have been much easier to deal with the fallout had the company thought about their online reputation beforehand — especially before proceeding with illegal practices worth an article in the press.

If the company already had the top 10 rankings on Google, they could simply spot optimize and push the bad press off the front page. But starting from scratch is a Promethean task when going up against the Internet media from the get go.

McCarthy’s ill-fated client said it best.

“I guess the old idiom applies to SEO reputation management. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

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