Here at Gravytrain, we work with a number of personal clients that desire control over how their name or “personal brand” shows up when people perform a search on Google, Bing or other search engines. In the recent past, Bing has leveraged its partnership with Facebook to provide user-specific results for those who are logged in to Facebook, so you can see results that are directly related to the names in your social network and not other people you don’t know. (As you can imagine, if your friend is named John Smith, a search may pull up some results that are entirely unrelated to the one you’re looking for.)
Today, Bing announced a new tool called Linked Pages that allows users to control what their Facebook friends will see about them when they search through Facebook’s Bing engine, or through Bing when logged in to Facebook. A user accomplishes this by selecting search results that are relevant to a search for their personal name, which are then aggregated together by the search engine and presented at the top result to that person’s friends (when logged into Facebook, of course). Let’s take a look at how making use of this tool can really improve how you show up to your social network in Bing’s results.
How Things Look on Bing Today
Let’s use my name for example. If one of my friends were to perform a search for my name through Facebook or Bing, here’s what they would find:

None of the top few results are me personally (the 2nd result isn’t even the correct spelling of my search… and why is it repeated 2 results below?) and would be of little use to any of my friends or contacts that happened to be searching for me to find more information, another social network profile, and more. Thanks to Linked Pages, that’s all about to change.
As I mentioned above, with Linked Pages a user can login to Bing through Facebook and select which of these results is relevant to them to have these rank higher than unrelated results to those in their social network. Conversely, by “neglecting” to select things that I don’t want linked, they are left out by omission and people may not bother to see them. Hello, free reputation management!
Let’s go through this step by step. First, head on over to the Bing Linked Pages site, and click “Get Started”.
After you click the button, you’ll be asked to sign in through Facebook and allow Bing to have access to some of your usual data on Facebook. Click on “Go to App”.

and do the necessary approvals required to get this sucker working. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented with the Bing search results and the ability to link pages to yourself (side note, if you’re not in the USA you might see an error when you try to connect. I guess Bing isn’t offering this outside of the US for now?):

As you can see, now we’re getting somewhere. Bing has correctly identified my LinkedIn page, and allows me to link this and every other page to myself. Hilariously, I can also link pages to other people which leaves open the opportunity for some serious trolling. Go through and click the link to me button on results that link to you (obviously) and when you’re done, you can perform another search for your name to see how things will look. This is what one of my friends sees when they are logged in to Facebook and searches for my name through Bing:

Ahh… now that’s more like it. There are the three pages that I linked to my profile, along with a nice picture and some info that Bing ripped from Facebook.
What Does this Mean?
Since these are basically just vanity results that only your Facebook friends will see, it doesn’t mean a whole lot yet. However, this is information that Bing can use in the future to ensure that your linked pages are the ones that are returned first for those who are likely to search your name. It’s just another piece of managing your total personal brand that you need to be aware of and make use of.
Got any thoughts? Share them in the comments below.


One thing that never ceases to amaze the Gravytrain team is how infrequently most website owners tend to post or update their site’s content (ironically, we’re notoriously bad for writing in our own blog. Guess we should practice what we’re preaching!). A number of our clients have finally started to take heed to our requests to continually build new content, whether in the form of blog posts, employee journals, new pages, manuals or other instructional pages, or other text-heavy pieces that are original and full of value to the reader. 