Bing recently announced a new configuration item in the Bing Webmaster tools focused to allow Webmasters to “disavow” incoming links. In a post from Duane Forrester he stated “Over the past few months we’ve being hearing from the industry that webmasters wanted more control and the ability to tell us they didn’t trust a link pointed at their content. While this is not a new conversation, our latest redesign work has enabled us to take action on this topic. “
This functionality allows a webmaster to submit an unlimited number of url’s to Bing to simply signal that these aren’t trusted, or considered low quality back-links. It also signifies a clear divergence of Bing’s search mentality from Google’s.
Google (with their Panda and Penguin updates) made the decision for their webmasters. Devaluing “unnatural content” via the usage of algorithms, and human (Google controlled) interactions. Bing is providing the power to the people.
This move, while not promoting huge changes in your ranking, allows Bing to start a true conversation. To understand why some links might be less important. It also allows webmasters to directly tell Bing to “forget” some of the bad links that may have been created by shady SEO companies.
I have recently worked on a project to “remove” bad links created by a black hat SEO company. I can tell you it is troublesome. Some directory owners are more than willing to help. They remove the links almost immediately after being contacted. Others, however, come back with often rude, and profanity riddled emails telling you no. The last, and becoming more regular response, was that you had to pay to get your links removed (since often you had to get your links added).
This opens the possibilities for a huge divergance in search strategies between the two big giants. Remember if your SEO strategy doesn’t cover Bing you are missing out on a lot of traffic (About 15.4% of it to be exact)