Get to Know Bing's Webmaster Guidelines

Michael Garrity — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:45:00 GMT

The big news in the search engine world this week has been the release of Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines (finally!), which are meant to help the webmasters and publishers get their content found and indexed on the Microsoft-owned search engine.

Slowly, but surely, Bing has been chipping away at Google’s long standing dominance in the search engine market, and with the release of these guidelines, the company has taken its biggest shot yet by positioning itself as a worthy alternative to Google that webmasters can get behind.

In many ways, the initial success of Google that led to it becoming the global and cultural phenomenon that it is now was due in large part to its willingness to cater to webmasters right out of the gate by providing them with useful information, tools and programs that they could use to develop and monetize their sites.

Until now, Bing has been slower to fully come around to webmasters, although the search engine has had a set of Webmaster Tools available for some time, which proved to be a good first stop in ingratiating itself with webmasters. With the release of the new Bing Webmaster Guidelines, the company is committing to being a webmaster-friendly service that puts their needs top-of-mind, and although the Guidelines aren’t much different than Google’s, they do provide a great refresher on what how Bing crawls, ranks and indexes sites.

Let’s take a look:

Content

First and foremost, the job of a webmaster is to publish content and get it noticed by the search engines, which are, for lack of a better term, too dumb to notice it on their own. Webmasters must provide “clear, deep, easy to find content” on their sites that make it more likely to be found, and ultimately indexed and shown in search results. Obviously this includes Web pages, but also images, white papers and videos, among other types. Rich, content-heavy sites that engage users and provide valuable (and evergreen) information are always the most sought after by search engines, and Bing is no exception.

Links

Gathering useful, authoritative links is one of the primary purposes of SEO, as they help Bing (and other search engines) “find new content and establish a vote of confidence between websites. As part of the Guidelines, Bing offers a resource section on link building that explicitly states that the search engine prefers organic links and says that the best ways to build links is by offering unique and engaging content, enabling social sharing and enabling copy-and-paste code snippets for visitors.

Social

With Google’s attempts to push for personalized search to become the new norm, the social aspect of Bing’s indexing and ranking is now the biggest consideration that webmasters must make, largely because of the Microsoft/Facebook partnership that integrates the world’s largest social network with Bing that includes a visitor’s Facebook friends in their search results to help influence them and providing positive signals that can impact organic rankings. Specifically, Bing frequently points to social sharing signals as a major way that the search engine measures influence. And since Facebook has significantly more users than Google+, Bing may very well become the standard for socially influenced search results.

Indexation

Bing explains that the best ways to be indexed by the search engine (and thus appear in SERPs) is to either link your content to Bing or use features that come with the Bing Webmaster Tools (e.g. Submit URL or Sitemap Upload) to make them aware of your content. The Webmaster Tools also feature a Crawl Control feature that lets you manage how Bing’s bot crawls your content and control when and how quickly your site is crawled (hint: Bing encourages that you do it quickly and deeply).

Technical

This section of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines examines a variety of different structural aspects of a website that can affect how they are crawled, indexed and eventually ranked on Bing’s SERPs. These include page load time, robots.txt, sitemaps, site technology, redirects and canonical tags.

Search Engine Optimization

The Guidelines directly distinguish the mains areas that webmasters should focus on when optimizing their websites, which include title tags, meta description tags, alt tags, <h1> tags, internal links, outbound links, social sharing, “crawlability” (i.e. XML sitemaps, robots.txt, navigational structure, URL structure, etc.), site structure (i.e. links, clean URLs, content hierarchy, etc.) and rich media warnings.

It also breaks down specific on-page SEO information about head copy, body copy, anchor text, content and links. For instance, it suggests using unique, relevant titles and descriptions that are around 65 and 160 characters, respectively. The Guidelines also inform webmasters that they should only use one <h1> tag per page, base their content on keyword research, don’t use images to house content, use targeted keywords as anchor text to support other internal pages, use <rel canonical> tags to help engines understand which pages they should index and much more.

Tactics to Avoid

Presumably just to be nice, the Bing Webmaster Guidelines also spell out a handful of different tactics that webmasters should avoid to keep from getting penalized by the search engine in a way that would negatively affect their rankings and standing on the site. In particular, the Guidelines warn against cloaking, using link building schemes (i.e. link farms, three-way linking, etc.), meta fresh redirects, duplicate content and social media schemes.

While the suggestions laid out in the Bing Webmaster Guidelines aren’t exactly groundbreaking, they do provide a great template and reference source for webmasters as they work to optimize their sites for search engines, particularly if they want to improve their Bing rankings. And since the Bing-Yahoo Network currently accounts for approximately 30 percent of the search market, it’s certainly not something they’re going to want to blow off.

Fight Spammy Links with New Webmaster Tool

Allison Howen — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 17:00:00 GMT

While building quality links can be a difficult task, avoiding suspicious or spammy links can be even more of a challenge.

This is why Bing has been hard at work to create a featue that enables Web workers to notify the search engine when a suspicious source has linked to their content. This new tool basically enables users to tell Bing that they want to distance themselves from a specific site. However, that isn’t the only news from Bing. The company has also made some announcements in regards to their recently launched SEO tool, SEO Analyzer.

Learn more about both of these new tools and their features below:

Disavow Links

Disavow Links, which is a new feature from Bing Webmaster Tools, offers Web workers a way to protect their website from malicious, or just pesky, links.

With Disavow Links, users can quickly alert Bing about links that aren’t trusted. Users can submit page, directory, or domain URLs that contain links to their site that seem unnatural, spammy or appear to be from low quality sites.

This feature is found in the “Configure Your Site” section of the navigation. When reporting a suspicious link, users can choose to input signals to Bing at the page level, directory level or domain level. Then, Bing notes the type of location (page, directory or domain) as well as the date that they were notified of the action. Furthermore, there is no limit on the number of links users can disavow with this tool.

According to Bing, users shouldn’t expect a dramatic change in their rankings as a result of using this feature. However, the information that is shared helps Bing more clearly understand what users think about specific sources that are linking to their content.

SEO Analyzer Updates

Bing also released some announcements in regards to the company’s recently launched tool SEO Analyzer, which can be used to scan URLs and build reports based on compliance with SEO best practices.

According to Bing, when users leverage the SEO Analyzer to fetch a webpage from their site and do a real-time scan for best practices compliance, they should note that this action will ignore any robots.txt directives that have been set in place. While Bingbot still follows robots.txt directives as normal, users that want to test a robots.txt compliance command must use the “Fetch as Bingbot” feature.

Additionally, SEO Analyzer can now follow redirects on websites. Bing states that this means if users give SEO Analyzer an active URL, the tool will follow the redirect and compose its report based on the first page it reaches that returns a 200 OK code header response. Users also have the ability to view each hop in the redirect change with a Show/Hide link, which displays each URL and response code. Furthermore, the tool follows up to six redirects – which hopefully shouldn’t all be needed.

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