Why people should stop being snarky at Bing's link disavow tool
seobitch
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5 min read
Last week Bing announced their new link disavow tool available in their Bing Webmaster Central, and SEOs immediately got snarky about how and why Bing could possibly need a tool such as this, especially when SEOs were all squirming with delight over the mere possibility that Google might come out with an identical tool, as Matt Cutts hinted at a couple of weeks ago.
Yes, we know in the bigger scheme of things that Bing doesn't matter nearly as much as Google when it comes to driving traffic to your sites. But once upon a time, Google didn't matter nearly as much as the search engines back in their early days did either, and look at the immense power Google is rocking it out with these days. Yes, Microsoft is huge, but Bing is still like their annoying little brother that just keeps tagging along. But all the sharp minded SEOs are taking note that Bing's market share is slowly but steadily taking teeny tiny dents out of Google's market share.
So Bing launched this awesome tool last week that will allow webmasters to essentially say "hey, we don't know where those links pointing to our site are, we want nothing to do with them, so please pretend they don't exist". Pretty cool tool in this day and age where Google has been penalizing sites with suspected paid or otherwise iffy back link profiles - however, it was Bing that launched the tool and not Google. So while Bing did something great for the webmaster community, it didn't take long for all kinds of bitchy comments targeting Bing's new tool to start. It seemed to begin first with a Search Engine Land news story.
Now, doesn't that title scream of a Rand Fishkin link bait title circa 2005? Since Vanessa Fox is an ex-Googler, it isn't surprising she came out with a blog post making a not so subtle jabs at Bing, but more so when she does it on the Search Engine Land platform. She built Webmaster Central at Google, so yes, I can see her being someone defensive that Bing launched a cool new tool before her former baby, especially one that webmasters have been begging for. It's funny how SEL has long had a love/hate relationship with Google, despite the fact that Matt Cutts is usually the keynote speaker at SMX (and it ironically being at SMX Advanced where Matt first hinted at the possibility of offering such a tool). But it just seemed to be very heavy on the "Bing sucks" bias to many readers.
Vanessa's article continues on with thinly veiled insults where she goes far out of her way to paint Bing in a pretty negative light, pulling out old blog posts and comments to show Bing's contradictory stance (but hello, Google has it's own contradictory posts too, which of course she didn't happen to mention). Ready to dig into her version of events? You can read her blog post here here. And to put it into perspective, their competitor Search Engine Watch did a similar story, but just the facts and quotes from Duane Forrester.
Then of course after the blog post came the obligatory tweet (which was retweeted numerous times).
Now Search Engine Land and Vanessa Fox were far from the only ones who did it, it just happens she was the one who wrote a particularly critical look at it before most others did, and the one everyone was retweeting. And that seemed to give people permission to do their own digs at Bing for launching a link disavow tool too, when really, they shouldn't be bitter at Bing for doing it first, they should be pissed at Google for not doing it..
At least some of them were pretty clever! But I degress.
What people are missing is the real point of the whole thing. Really, Bing did the biggest favor it could to SEOs, aside from making them look ahead of the game compared to Google. Because now Google is going to have to come up with a response to that, because do they really want Bing to have the tool that all SEOs are stomping their feet to get? Bing got a huge amount of mileage out of the story, and who knows, they might have heard Matt Cutts talk about the fact Google was considering offering the same tool and thought "Damn, we should do this first", and while Google was pondering the ramifications of it (which could be significant depending on how it is rolled out, because of how spammers could manipulate it for their own good), Bing just went ahead and did it (and to be honest, I am surprised they did!)
While not many SEOs will actually sit down and use the tool for more than testing (unless they have been hit by Google's penalties), I do hope Bing releases the numbers of how many links were disavowed or how many people are using it, the numbers could be surprising. Bing won't necessarily get more market share out of this per se, however, it did go a hell of a long way towards providing good will and happy feelings to the non-snarky webmasters.
What should Bing do next? The best possible thing Bing can do right now is get the right people on board and continue building those dream tools that all the Google minded SEOs want, because it not only gets more people using the Bing Webmaster Central but it also puts Google on the defensive to answer with their own tool, or explain why they won't offer it, but Google has so far been mum on the issue since Bing's launch.
In other words, game on!
Now, doesn't that title scream of a Rand Fishkin link bait title circa 2005? Since Vanessa Fox is an ex-Googler, it isn't surprising she came out with a blog post making a not so subtle jabs at Bing, but more so when she does it on the Search Engine Land platform. She built Webmaster Central at Google, so yes, I can see her being someone defensive that Bing launched a cool new tool before her former baby, especially one that webmasters have been begging for. It's funny how SEL has long had a love/hate relationship with Google, despite the fact that Matt Cutts is usually the keynote speaker at SMX (and it ironically being at SMX Advanced where Matt first hinted at the possibility of offering such a tool). But it just seemed to be very heavy on the "Bing sucks" bias to many readers.
Vanessa's article continues on with thinly veiled insults where she goes far out of her way to paint Bing in a pretty negative light, pulling out old blog posts and comments to show Bing's contradictory stance (but hello, Google has it's own contradictory posts too, which of course she didn't happen to mention). Ready to dig into her version of events? You can read her blog post here here. And to put it into perspective, their competitor Search Engine Watch did a similar story, but just the facts and quotes from Duane Forrester.
Then of course after the blog post came the obligatory tweet (which was retweeted numerous times).
Now Search Engine Land and Vanessa Fox were far from the only ones who did it, it just happens she was the one who wrote a particularly critical look at it before most others did, and the one everyone was retweeting. And that seemed to give people permission to do their own digs at Bing for launching a link disavow tool too, when really, they shouldn't be bitter at Bing for doing it first, they should be pissed at Google for not doing it..
At least some of them were pretty clever! But I degress.
What people are missing is the real point of the whole thing. Really, Bing did the biggest favor it could to SEOs, aside from making them look ahead of the game compared to Google. Because now Google is going to have to come up with a response to that, because do they really want Bing to have the tool that all SEOs are stomping their feet to get? Bing got a huge amount of mileage out of the story, and who knows, they might have heard Matt Cutts talk about the fact Google was considering offering the same tool and thought "Damn, we should do this first", and while Google was pondering the ramifications of it (which could be significant depending on how it is rolled out, because of how spammers could manipulate it for their own good), Bing just went ahead and did it (and to be honest, I am surprised they did!)
While not many SEOs will actually sit down and use the tool for more than testing (unless they have been hit by Google's penalties), I do hope Bing releases the numbers of how many links were disavowed or how many people are using it, the numbers could be surprising. Bing won't necessarily get more market share out of this per se, however, it did go a hell of a long way towards providing good will and happy feelings to the non-snarky webmasters.
What should Bing do next? The best possible thing Bing can do right now is get the right people on board and continue building those dream tools that all the Google minded SEOs want, because it not only gets more people using the Bing Webmaster Central but it also puts Google on the defensive to answer with their own tool, or explain why they won't offer it, but Google has so far been mum on the issue since Bing's launch.
In other words, game on!