In conjunction with Pubcon this fall, the US Search Awards will be held in Las Vegas.  These awards have been around a while outside the US, but 2013 marks the first time they’ve come to the USA.  If you think you’ve done outstanding work, or know of something amazing that was done somewhere, now’s your chance to give a huge shout out.  Duane Forrester from Bing’s Webmaster Tools program is on the judging...
Read More

It’s a busy world and things move fast.  With that in mind, I’m going to do a light touch on a few features we added in the not-to-distant past, in case folks missed them the first time. Site Move Need to move your site?  This feature lets you scope whether you’re moving a directory, a subdomain or a domain.  You can then spec where the destination is to let us know about that move.  Two options exist to...
Read More

Today we are making some changes to the way webmasters can manage deep links in Bing Webmaster Tools. Deep links are additional links in our search results that show up underneath the primary search result URL and that generally link to popular destinations on the website. For example, here are the deep links shown for the MSN site on Bing.com (outlined in orange):     These deep links are generated algorithmically. Generally, the...
Read More

Is creating useful content really that hard?  That kind of depends on who is defining “useful”.  From the POV of the person creating it, “useful might look like “300 words built around <insert keyword>, answer <three> key questions as listed, scan for typos and grammar, then post.  Move on to the next topic.  In fairness, we know not everyone follows that pattern, but far too many do. &ldquo...
Read More

Shortcuts.  Such a negative term, isn’t it?  Perhaps we should call it “seeking efficiencies”?  But you, it won’t matter what you call it, it’s a bad path to follow when seeking support for your SEO and social activities. Every day, webmasters are surprised to learn that some tactics they thought were safe because some so-called expert told them it would work, are actually harming their chances of...
Read More

Last week we talked about the coming of the Chicken.  I found it amusing that I started, almost immediately, to get tweets from folks asking if this was an algo update that was pending. Was Chicken maybe a code name for a big update we were planning ahead of SMX Advanced?  Would more animals follow?  Perhaps Chicken was organic, and Cow might affect Image Search. Fact is, it’s not.  This Chicken cometh bearing a gift. The...
Read More

From ice flows to jungles, our industry has embraced wildlife as a way to communicate change.  Who’d have expected creatures we thought so endearing would wreak havoc and turn worlds upside down.  Between penguins and pandas and honey badgers, the changes have been many. While some changes have been viewed as negative, others were seen as positive.  Clearly, one cannot judge the change by its animal spirit alone.  Could...
Read More

Back in February we launched our beta Bing Sitemap Plugin tool, which enabled anyone to install this on their servers, and have managed sitemaps in place.  Versions are available for IIS and Apache servers, so a wide variety of businesses could benefit from this great feature.  It would create sitemaps for you, and also create a delta sitemap, alerting Bing to your newest content since it last pinged us. Having both comprehensive and...
Read More

We’ve had thousands of people view these webinars, but if you haven’t seen them yet, here they are again.  During the fall and winter, we put together a series of 6 webinars.  Each is about an hour long, and captures the webinar presentation, as well as the live Q&A we did during each session. Each webinar was free and open to anyone to join, which is a format we’ll obviously keep in the future.  If there are...
Read More

The Bing Ads team has been hard at work. From launching Sitelinks that allows deeper engagement, more messaging, and improve CTR to the continued global expansion, the Bing Ads team is certainly riding the momentum to deliver a new improvements and functionality. To show some of the recent progress, the team created this nifty infographic on the Power of Bing Ads. If you’re not a Bing Ads customer, you can sign up here. If you’ve got a...
Read More