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There is a large thread at the Bing Community on the topic of how Bing treats domain names. There are some people that feel that Bing's algorithm weighs too heavily on words in a domain name.
Cleo started the thread, which now has about 30 replies, even from Brett Young of Microsoft. Cleo said:
If I have one criticism of the Bing, it is that it puts WAY too much emphasis currently on keyword domain names. Like for example, if you made bread and had a website named www.bread.com, it would rank really high with Bing. However, the actually quality and content or even code of the website may be terrible. It may not even be related to bread, but the people at Bing put way too much emphasis on just the names alone...In the past and present, it has been a major source of abuse/keyword stuffing.
Two things I find interesting in this thread.
(1) The topic of how valuable a domain name is in the eyes of Bing. Clearly this is up for debate and anything you see today, can change tomorrow.
(2) How a site was sent to the spam team for review after discussion in the thread. Yes, you may be able to expedite spam reviews if you complain about specific sites in the Bing community.
Forum discussion at Bing Community.
Comments:
Chris
07/13/2009 02:02 pm
I agree, I think all major search engine's put too much weight on domain names.
tom
07/13/2009 02:35 pm
while i think that KIDs get more weight in Bing than the other two, I actually think that with Bing's new algo this is a lot less of a factor than it was with Live
Lee
07/13/2009 03:34 pm
I think domain names are an important factor. If your topic is truly about phones for example, it would probably be in your domain. If not, maybe you're not as solely about phones as someone who would have it in their domain name.
Michael Martinez
07/13/2009 03:46 pm
These are just another group of incompetent SEOs complaining about nonsense. Even in the exmaple queries they offer Ickipedia and other non-keyword domain names are ranking highly.
Brent
07/13/2009 04:20 pm
We saw a double hyphen domain name on the first page of Bing. LOL
tony
07/13/2009 04:25 pm
humans communicate through language and so do search engines, keyword domains are important seo factors. If you're not recommending it to your customers then you can't complain. If you're not buying it, you can't complain.
LoneWolf777
07/13/2009 04:25 pm
And their point is? Domain names should be considered a very important factor. Hotels.com is about? Cars.com is about? Lawyers.com is about? People who think the domain name doesn't matter should step out of their cave.
Rob Woods
07/13/2009 05:37 pm
Is there any real difference between this and how Live Search treated domain names? Why the controversy now? Microsoft search properties have weighted domain names heavily for some time. Frankly, in my industry Bing is just Live Search with a new skin. The same old keyword heavy domain names are ranking near the top just as they always did. I'm seeing virtually no changes in the rankings of sites in my vertical between Bing and Live.
Arnie Katz
07/13/2009 06:03 pm
If you don't think keyords in the domain name are important search for anything on a search engine. it only makes sence.
Troy
07/14/2009 05:53 am
Are all the people with bad domains complaining about people with good domains? Seriously though, there's no point Bing throwing up the same results as Google. We already have a Google. Bing needs to provide an alternative result set and that appears to be what they're doing. Don't like Google's results? Then try Bing. I know I use both.
Steve
07/14/2009 01:43 pm
Bing seems to give better results for my searches. I personally ted to weigh a domain name when looking at the search results. If the domain is relevant to my search phrase I am much more likely to visit that site.
Al
07/15/2009 01:45 pm
My objection so far with keywords in domains & Bing isn't that they are weighting them too heavily - but more to do with spamming tactics that are getting through - such as crazy sub-domain wildness. Consider the following example: http://keywordphrase.unrelateddomain.com Currently Bing is ranking those sorts of domains very highly when the primary domain has little to nothing to do with the keywordphrase. In this instance, I think treating the subdomain as if it were a folder under the primary domain would help weed out that sort of crap.
Spindleman
09/24/2009 01:09 am
Domain names should not matter very much in search engine results compared to the quality of the site. I have seen high rankings for good domain names when they barely have a working website. Conversely - Amazon, Ebay and Bing!