Hooray another search engine... sorry "decision engine" according to Microsoft.  What's does Bing mean for people like me?  New rules, new headaches, and more importantly new research.  While it's still a fledgling at this point, Bing has sparked enough interest to make me actually care about trying to devote extra effort into gaining ranking somewhere other than Google, which still holds 60% of the search engine market share.

Don't get me wrong, I always try to rank everywhere.  But, with such a fickle science as SEO, once I gain optimal ranking on Google, I stick to whatever I'm doing until I see a fall off.  Sort of a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" mentality. If you try to do too much you can sometimes get nailed with a penality.  While a lot of us who spend a substantial amount of time with SEO know what will and will-not affect our ranking... sometimes you just get blindsided.  Personally I feel maintaining ranking is somewhat simple, but fixing something I accidentally broke is an absolute nightmare.

That said, I don't see too much difference so far in the ranking of sites I maintain on Bing versus the old ranking in MSN Live Search from a few weeks ago.  Either I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing for every search engine (which is highly unlikely), or the algorithm hasn't changed that much.  While Microsoft has gone from a 9% share to an a 11% share in the search engine market with Bing, I'm going to treat it as a new wrapper for the same product.  Well... that is until I see some major issues with the ranking of the sites I manage.  I will however start running tests of cause and effect in Bing for some of the sites that don't do so hot on either search engine.

There is one change I can tell you for sure though.  The old link for submitting your site to Live Search is dead, and it doesn't direct you to where you need to go (which in my opinion is pretty half-assed by Microsoft).  For those of you not in the know, this is a tool for submitting your site to the Microsoft web crawler, MSNbot, to hopefully have your new site found and indexed faster.  Does it really work, who knows?  But, I'm all for using every tool at your disposal.  The new link for submitting your URL to Bing is here.