Heads up on <head> tag optimization (SEM 101)

Much of what constitutes a well-architected webpage is never displayed in the page itself. The contents of the <body> tag are what you see in a browser. But a webpage consists of two major elements, the <body> tag only being one. The content of the <head> tag (and for that matter, the document type declaration (DTD), which precedes the <head> tag in the page’s code, is just as important for search engine optimization ...
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New bot work continues at Bing

Back in December of 2008, we alerted you to the possibility that you might start seeing our new web crawler in your referrer logs. Given the recent excitement around the arrival of Bing, we wanted to take a moment to update you on the latest bot news. As we said earlier, you will see the new Bing crawler user agent string listed as: msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm). Note that we didn’t change the bot’s name for Bing...
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Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

It wasn’t that long ago that I discussed in this blog how to create good content that will get your site noticed, by both end users and search engines. But to be clear, just writing some slick text is not the whole story. The previous blog articles in the Site Architecture and SEO series (files/pages and link/URLs) made reference to doing what you can to help the search engine web crawler (also known as a robot or, more simply, a bot) crawl...
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Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Links can be the lifeblood of a good website, as we discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly. But how well you manage them on your site from a site architecture perspective can be the difference between your website being starved for oxygen (aka search engine referral traffic) versus healthy and thriving. That’s why we do search engine optimization (SEO). This article is part 2 of the recent Site Architecture...
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Site architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Search engine optimization (SEO) has three fundamental pillars upon which successful optimization campaigns are run. Like a three-legged stool, take one away, and the whole thing fails to work. The SEO pillars include: content (which we initially discussed in Are you content with your content?), links (which we covered in Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly, Part 1 and Part 2), and last but not least, site architecture. You can have great...
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New tools for webmasters in the Bing Toolbox

Today we’re really excited to announce the arrival of the Bing Toolbox, a new portal for all you Bing webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers out there. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to our Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums. The Toolbox provides everything you need to work with Bing in one place—as well as the site you’ll want to regularly visit...
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Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS

I guess you can’t RT useful and interesting blog articles as easily as you can tweets, so I’m writing here today to pass on the latest news from our teammates in the Bing Developer Center. They’ve just released the updated Bing API Web Page Error Toolkit. I’ll be talking about custom 404 error pages on this blog soon, but for those who want a head-start on the subject, be sure to check out the Developer Center blog post...
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Updating the Webmaster Center RSS feed provider

Another short post today. The Webmaster Center team has updated its RSS feed provider. If you use our RSS feed to keep up with the latest and greatest news from the Bing Webmaster Center team, please update your RSS feed today! Thanks! — Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly—Part 2 (SEM 101)

In the previous blog post, Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly—Part 1, I discussed that links are de facto endorsements of the site linked to, that the relevance of the linked to page to the one linking to it is critical for determining the value of the link, and how the quantity vs. quality argument shapes up regarding links. I also defined what is good and bad about each. So let’s pick up where I left off last time in our...
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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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