Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 4 (SEM 101)

This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review (Part 1), then took an initial look at page-level issues (Part 2), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues (Part 3), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site...
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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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Webmaster Center blog comments Q&A, Round 3

The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can’t wait to share with you (patience, Grasshopper – all will be revealed in time). But the blog waits for no one (well, that’s the intent, anyway). From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it’s that time again. So let’s get to it. Q: I...
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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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The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam (SEM 101)

In the exciting world of today’s Internet, where the world’s information is literally at your fingertips, where you can endlessly communicate, shop, research, and be entertained, spam is a big downer. The unwanted email spam that fills our inboxes also consumes huge portions of the available bandwidth of our routers and trunk lines. But email is not the only spam game in town. Web spam is the bane (well, one of the banes) of the...
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Eggs, bacon, spam, spam, and spam (SEM 101)

What is spam? One could argue that spam is a multi-faceted thing. The word itself has many definitions. For example, it can be defined as a processed spiced ham and pork slathered with a gelatinous glaze food product found in a tin (it’s apparently very popular in Hawai’i, don’t you know?). However, spam is also often used to reference a very popular comedy sketch written and performed on Monty Python’s Flying Circus (it...
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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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Bing keeps the web safe with malware filter

We at Bing absolutely believe that security is one of our top priorities. We will keep investing in security, as one of our primary goals is to protect and secure our users and provide them with a safe search experience. What have we noticed in Bing? Over the last year, we have seen an increase in social engineering malware. Malware providers mostly target popular search queries on antivirus products, free software downloads, and related technical...
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Bing contributes to SIR6

Here at Microsoft, the fun is not just working on interesting projects but sharing interesting results across groups to help our users. And when this information exchange is in the area of security, you just feel elated that you have done the right thing. Thanks to our friends at Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), we were able to publish some interesting data analysis for the security community through Microsoft’s Security...
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