Bing SEO! Do I have to optimize for Bing now?

(EDIT: This series is updated here: Part 2: some answers, Google vs Bing SEO which was written after Bings launch)

Relax, it's not even out yet and don't touch your code in public. I'm full of questions that will soon be discussed and answered within the SEO community, I do predict a shakeup of sorts however.

Bing will be much more strict than Google, hardly operating based on linkbacks and on-site SEO at all, but rather research and only ranking authoritive sites, or passing linkjuice only from authoritive sites and their pages. This is something the Google Monster will not do and in a sense is why I believe Bing is set for failure. If my batsenses are working right, bloggers particularly are not going to do well on Bing results.

These are some Bing concerns and questions when thinking about how the community will be effected by Bing in terms of SEO, especially bloggers.

Bing can sort by location

So am I going to see more search traffic (from Bing! OMG yay!) if I type 'new york' into some of my blog posts because that's where I am and where my internet footprints come from?

Bing can sort in favor of jobs

So will having the JobThread advertisement widget provoke more Bing visits? Or is this just open to Monster.com Careerbuilder.com Hotjobs and a couple other ones?

Product reviews, health keywords, travel decisions Oh my!

Is Bing going to send more (search?) traffic to my blog if I sell something in the sidebar with great product reviews? Or is this strictly voted on by users.. kinda like Digg??

Does Bing respond to nofollow? What about PageRank, what's my BingRank?

LoL, relax. I'm going to assume they implement nofollow and even stricter ranking rules then the Google Monster.

Are you excited?

I'm thrilled. Ask.com actually tried this and failed back in 2007 - here's a blog post from back then about it on SearchEngineLand.com* Turns out that it has almost the same features as Bing and what's eerie is they put out a similiar promotional video, like the one you can see now on Bing.com - there was also some babble about it competing with Google at the time.. deja vu?

Bing was originally named Kumo apparently, it was internally tested among Microsoft employees recently according to SearchEngineLand, you can read the memo sent to the employees via the link.

I pulled this little tidbit of hard earned and spent Microsoft research dollars out of the article for you, my readers attention:

"In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes." -SearchEngineLand

Interesting. So let's see if Microsoft can do anything about that. I'll be watching, so will the black hats - I don't think Microsoft knows what it just got itself into.