Dear Santa, I’m a Search Engine, and I want…to give away $5000 in Bing Ads Credits!

Hi Santa, my name is Bing and I’m a Search Engine.  Just wanted to drop you a note to let you know there are some things I’d like for the Holidays.  I’ve tried to be good this year and be more helpful to everyone, as much as I could.  Back in June I released a whole new set of Webmaster Tools, which let site owners find data easier, discover links pointed to any site on the web and SEO Tools and Reports to help site owners build better sites.

It’s been tough sometimes though, with sites mis-using canonical tags, setting crawl delays that force me to skip content and sites still thinking duplicating content is a viable tactic. 

I know you’re probably curious about that $5,000 USD advertising giveaway I mentioned, Santa, but please bear with me as my list to you isn’t very long:

Bing Webmaster Tools – Santa, webmasters hope for the best, but have also to prepare for the worst.  Please tell them that Bing Webmaster Tools is the free tool helping them to monitor their site, know who is linking to them and that it can help them fix some common issues directly within the tool.  It makes a great stocking stuffer!

Avoid useless URLs parameters – Santa, as you care about pollution for the health of your reindeer, and because global warming at the north pole will set you adrift, please tell webmasters to normalize their URLs fixing their site via Bing Webmaster Tools.  They can avoid extra crawls and dilution of relevance due to duplicate content if they take this step.

Robots.txt – please help webmasters learn how to use this powerful tool.  I recently found, during a meeting with some companies, that 50% of them were blocking crawlers.  And they all wanted to know why they weren’t getting indexed.

Sitemaps – please help websites keep these clean, as dirty sitemaps cause me to ignore the sitemap completely over time.

Proper redirects – please help webmasters understand what the difference between a rel-canonical and a 301 redirect is, and to know to not use a rel-canonical when they should use a 301 redirect.

Quality content – Santa, they need some help on this one, so dig deep to help them understand that quality content is not made by scraping other sites or using articles from online article sites.  As you, I and Rudolph know, quality content helps a searcher complete their task and is unique.

Crawl delay – This is basic, I know Santa, but some folks don’t understand that if they set a high crawl delay in their robots.txt, it’ll slow down indexing to the point we might not be able to get all their content.  There are only so many hours in a day, after all.  Santa, you’re the master of “global coverage in 24 hours or less”, so we know you understand this one.

That’s it Santa.  My list is short this year mostly because I’m in a giving mood! 

The team over at Bing Ads is running a sweepstakes and giving away $5,000 USD in advertising on Bing Ads! 

There is a $3,000 USD grand prize and two $1,000 USD secondary prizes to be awarded!  That’s a lot of advertising for a business, all from a location with excellent conversions.  If you’re spending $100 a month on paid search advertising this could be a year or more of advertising for your business.  I know you don’t need the advertising Santa, but so many others would benefit from this if you could help spread the word. 

Here are the details:

US Webmasters: $5,000 in Bing Ads credits are up for grabs in the Bing Ads Sweepstakes

We wanted to give something back this holiday, so we’re running a Bing Ads Sweepstakes with $5,000 in Bing Ads credits to be won! You can enter once per day between now and December 31st and get an extra entry for referring a friend (or colleague). Enter today!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to legal residents of the 50 U.S. states or D.C., 18+. Sweepstakes ends 12/31/2012. See Official Rules for details.