New Inbound Links Feature in Bing Webmaster Tools

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Inbound Links feature. Bing Webmaster Tools now provides registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites.  We received plenty of feedback from site owners and SEOs that expressed the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing and to make the right improvements.   The new functionality...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 3 (SEM 101)

Let's continue our run-down of issues to consider in a site review. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the whats and whys for doing a site review, and covered baselining pre-optimized performance and gathering tools. Part 2 covered important but often overlooked on-page issues that, if not properly addressed, can prove detrimental to a site's performance, both for search engine ranking as well as for usability and discoverability for...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 2 (SEM 101)

Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web (such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit!), you're ready to start...
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301 to 404 gets 200 – oops! (From the Forums)

In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away. The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question. It was soon...
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How to improve ranking (From the Forums)

We in the Bing Webmaster Center team are very fortunate to have such a bright, vibrant, and helpful community of users in our Webmaster Center forums. From time to time, I will take a moment to highlight some useful and interesting threads found in the forums in this new blog column. The goal of this new, periodically published column is multifold. First, I want to identify the Webmaster Center forums as a useful resource for webmasters and SEOs...
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The liability of loathsome, link-level web spam (SEM 101)

When I was a kid in high school, I used to go to the public library and do initial research in the Encyclopedia Britannica (yes, the bound book editions. I also remember black & white television with vacuum tubes and rotary telephones! Sheesh, I’m getting old!). I would pick up the index volume that contained the keyword I wanted to look up to identify which of the main volumes had the content I sought. But imagine this: when I opened...
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Webmaster Center blog comments Q&A, Round 2

We still get many questions in our blog comments, even though we try to encourage our readers to post their questions to our Webmaster Center forums (which are actually staffed to answer your questions!). I do look through the blog comments every day and delete those that are junk (those that are empty, duplicated, offensive, and overtly spammy – see our Q&A reply on why blog comments are deleted in the 1st Webmaster Center blog Q&A...
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Link building for smart webmasters (no dummies here) (SEM 101)

In past SEM 101 articles, we’ve talked about the importance of inbound links to successful ranking (see “Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” – Part 1 and Part 2). We’ve already discussed many issues surrounding them, but we haven’t done a dedicated post on how to be successful at link building from a search engine’s perspective. Let’s finally address that omission here and now. What is the point...
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Webmaster Center blog Q&A

We’ve been really busy here at the Bing Webmaster Center blog team, pumping out new content on a regular basis to create a nice library of content on issues that matter to webmasters and online publishers. I thought I’d take a moment to catch my breath, pause on creating a new thematic article (or yet another multi-part series!) for SEM 101, and address some commonly asked questions in the blog comments. Q: Why wasn’t my...
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Common errors that can tank a site (SEM 101)

Imagine being a content developer for a website. You write a bunch of clever and informative articles, which should deliver a good dose of new visitors and ranking potential to the site. You submit them to the IT department for publishing online, and wait for good things to happen. But instead, it all falls flat. A look at your web analytics tools reveals that the number of site visitors has not increased over the time your new material was...
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