I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine.  In reading the reviews, I am not alone.  I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking.  What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms.  As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google.  Unfortunately Google is the new Google.”  However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy.  In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing.  The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not.  For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL.   Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked.  Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.