Bing Webmaster Blog - Page 16

Bingbot is coming to town

Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1st, 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details, what the change means in terms of...
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Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon

Since our last post in November, the Bing team has been busy rolling out improvements to the Bing web crawler. As a result of this work, we want to announce in advance our plans to change the name of our crawler (aka user agent). Out of beta with a new name On October 1st, 2010, we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft’s new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2...
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Smarter 404 pages on WordPress with Bing

In this blog, we’ve previously discussed matters relating to custom 404 pages in Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations (SEM 101), returning the correct HTTP status code with your custom 404 pages in 301 to 404 gets 200 – oops! (From the Forums), and using Bing toolkits to develop such pages in Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS. Earlier this week we announced one of the results of our recent collaboration with Cal Evans, PHP...
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Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot

Search engines, such as Bing, need to regularly crawl websites not only  to  index new content, but also to check for content changes and removed content. Bing offers webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to accommodate web server load issues. The use of such a setting is not always needed nor is it generally recommended, but it is available for use by webmasters should the need arise. Websites that are small (page-wise) and...
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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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Bing enhances support for large Sitemaps

We have another quick but important announcement today. Bing, along with the other search engines that are a part of Sitemaps.org, has announced support for the following Sitemap enhancements: 1. You can now include up to 50,000 references (either URLs or links to child Sitemaps) in your sitemap.xml index file. Until recently, Sitemap files only supported about 1,000 child references. This enhancement will be very useful to extremely large sites...
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How to remove URLs from our index (expanded edition)

This has been an excellent week in Webmaster Center. Our new Bing community forums are alive and vibrant with excellent questions and people who are willing to share their knowledge. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated. We look forward to your continued participation going forward! I’ve received a couple great questions on the forums lately and, although we have posted on a few of these...
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Are you content with your content? (SEM 101)

Let’s just say it. Content is king. There. It’s done. That’s everything you need to know about improving page rank, right? Well… Content may be king, but as in modern monarchies, the king may not be the sole authority. Parliaments now rule, and they are made up of many constituent parts of society. And while the quality of your site’s content can have a leading role in helping you optimize your site’s organic...
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