Bing Vs Google

At the risk of writing the gajillion-and-first post on "Bing Vs Google", I thought I'd nonetheless pen down my own impression of these two engines, just based on my own findings.

Without question the search results I get for some of my websites are very different between the two engines - to the favour of Bing, I have to say! However - and maybe tellingly - the results between Bing and say Yahoo, Altavista and Ask are not that far apart.

All the websites under my care are new startups. And whilst I am able to write and optimise the content of each of these sites whilst staying within the rules - i.e. not getting spammy - it seems to be "this" activity that gets my sites - e.g. infrared-heating-redwell.co.uk to page 1 line 1 of Bing, whilst leaving it nowhere to be seen on Google.

Also, all the sites under my care, as new startups, have very little web history behind them and we're only just beginning to break ground into link building estate, so our history with Google and consequently our reputational score, will be low.

As if to prove the point, one new client of mine is a well established, 'old' site which is very-well linked into for a number of historical reasons but poorly optimised, covering about 3 or 4 major and very diverse topics. However, look up any phrase for any of those topics and "blammo!" page 1 on Google and often-times nowhere to be seen on Bing.

The trouble is that this client's site, offering such diverse services and not very well optimised is confusing - if not offputting - to customers. So despite their good SERPS results on Google, quite often you'll be searching for one thing and land on a page about something else.

Can I presume therefore an over-preponderance of "age and in-links" to Google's ranking and maybe a bias the other way (towards highly optimised "niche" sites) on the other engines?

I don't have enough evidence to suggest that is "the definitive" answer and nor do I think it will be a long-term one. Clearly over time I believe a balance of the four forces (niche; content; history; inlinks) will be in everyones best interest to obtain great results. Perhaps at the moment the greatest value in Bing is to "nudge" the people like my new client into looking at their propositions and content and seeking to bring both up to date!