Wondering why your site isn’t as “indexed” as you’d like? Check your crawler control signals before getting too upset. We see a lot of websites making mistakes which can block indexing. While we’d like to ignore those mistakes and simply ingest the content anyway, that’s not always in your best interest, so far safer that we follow your suggestions.
Be sure to read How To Verify Bingbot is...
Read More
Bing Webmaster Blog - Page 14
Everything has a value. The items you sell on your site, the time you work on projects and the time you spend optimizing your site. We’re all used to thinking in terms of ROI (return on investment), taking pains to track revenue against the work done to justify the initial work.
These are great, if typical, ideas.
In Las Vegas, there’s a term the casinos use to describe the value a visitor represents to them. The goal...
Read More
Since we posted about this topic a long, long time ago (especially if we’re counting in Internet years), it’s time for a refresher on how to verify that a bot visiting your site claiming to be a Bing crawler is really coming from Bing. If you see what appears to be Bingbot traffic in your server logs based on a user agent string, for example Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm), and you want to know...
Read More
Most sites end up bucketing their work for SEO and social into four main areas, thought his may not be a conscious decision. You may label them differently, and some may be fuller than others, but the goal remains the same – to achieve success in each area:
Quality
Trust
Popularity
Timeliness
Each area is important because it’s achieving balance across them that brings success online today. Each are individually is...
Read More
It’s no secret that creating compelling, unique content is the way forward. It’s also no secret that creating that content takes time and work. But is it really as hard as people seem to think it is? If you had a template to follow when creating your content, would that make it easier to do? Here’s a list of questions that can get you started:
What’s my topic (target phrase/keyword)?
What questions...
Read More
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website to make it more relevant to searchers and search engines. At its very core, SEO is about improving usability on a website. Let’s take a look at some of the big ticket topics.
Read More
There’s a lot of focus on link building these days. Maybe a bit more than usual, in fact. It seems people just cannot get enough information about links. This “link lust” drives webmasters crazy. It makes otherwise rational people participate in crazy schemes all in an effort to rank better. Coveting thy neighbor’s links is practically a career choice nowadays. This week we’ll take a...
Read More
Links, links, links. It’s pretty much at the top of any SEOs “must discuss” list of topics. For a long time, the prevailing thinking was links were the golden egg. They were what you needed to turn the tide and boost your rankings. And that was true.
Today, though, it might pay to broaden your thinking.
I am not saying links are dead or links have no value – let’s get that straight up front...
Read More
On any given day, an SEO walks into their office and knows they have 8 hours to get 12 hours of work done (or is that 12 hours to get 18 hours of work done…?). Where should they put their time? Let’s review some of the options faced by SEOs every day and dig into each one a little bit. This is not a priority ordered list, as everyone’s needs will stack the list differently.
Time into SEO
This is the technical...
Read More
Last week we introduced a significant update to our Webmaster Tools. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a deeper look at the features we now offer to help you understand what they do and how to use them. For this week, we’ll start off with a couple of the new favorites folks seem to like. Let’s dive in and explore the SEO Reports and the SEO Analyzer.
It’s important to note the order we cover these in, as there’s some...
Read More