Blogs

In a continuous effort to enhance the Bing user experience and promote the expression of free speech while simultaneously upholding the rights of intellectual property and copyright holders, Bing has streamlined the copyright removals process.  We heard your feedback and understand that sometimes websites that experience alleged copyright infringement issues have a difficult time gaining visibility into the problem and getting relisted. ...
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For years, the sitemaps protocol defined at www.sitemaps.org stated that each sitemap file (or each sitemap index file) may contain no more than 50,000 URLs and must not be larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). While most sitemaps are under this 10 MB file limit, these days, our systems occasionally encounter sitemaps exceeding this limit. We are happy to announce that we are increasing sitemaps file size.
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Lack of communication is a leading cause of divorce. Communication is vital, and sharing the status of a copyright infringement notice is no exception. Bing just made this easier - a new online dashboard provides insight into the status of a copyright removal request, as well as providing overall historical submission statistics.
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Bing has refined the generic malware warning to specifically call out phishing threats, and sites that are (likely) safe to visit but link to malicious binaries. The webmaster dashboard is updated for these refined warnings, which includes the binary paths triggering the warning. Today, Chad Foster from the Bing Team will walk us through the changes.
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Well managed sitemaps greatly increase Bing’s ability to locate, access and index all of the relevant URLs on your website. Today Fabrice Canel from the Bing Team will be talking about the best practices for managing your sitemaps. Cheers! - Avishek Mazumder, Program Manager II, Bing Webmaster Tools
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Earlier this year, we shared our approach to mobile-friendly search and ranking and talked about our plans for Webmaster tool additions that will aid site owners in their efforts to create mobile-friendly sites.  Today, I am happy to introduce you to Charu Puhazholi from the Webmaster Team and Shyam Jayasankar from the Mobile Ranking Team. In today’s post, Charu and Shyam will be talking about the availability of the Bing Webmaster Mobile...
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Saying Goodbye to Link Explorer Saying goodbye is never easy, but the time has come to do just that with a member of the Bing Webmaster Tools family: starting October 1st, 2015 we are shutting down Link Explorer. Why say goodbye? Link Explorer has been part of Webmaster Tools since the June 2012 release (called “Phoenix”) and provided an easy way to see a sample of links pointing to a given site — not just your own — making it a simple...
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In our April Webmaster post, we showed marking up your data increases exposure of your content to over 100M users of Bing and its partners.  Today, we are excited to deepen our relationship with webmasters and site owners by accepting image data feeds of your site content. Data feeds are the best way to influence how your content is presented in search results. For example, providing item purchase data enables the recently announced Places to Buy...
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At Microsoft, we’re committed to helping users keep their data safe and secure. That’s why we support the industry’s move to use of TLS protocols as part of our effort to expand encryption across our networks and services. Bing has already been offering users the option to encrypt search traffic for about a year and a half now. Beginning this summer, we will begin the process of encrypting search traffic by default. This means that traffic...
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You’ve focused your energy on optimizing your website to get traffic from search engines. You’ve done this with a great site structure and architecture, superb crawlability, and — of course — top notch content. More recently, you’ve been working mad hours to ensure your site shines on mobile. Perhaps you’re already mobile-friendly and are seeing the mobile-friendly label for your site in the search results. But now your company is going all in on...
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