Advanced query operators - filetype: & ext: - understanding the differences

Bing offers various advanced query operators, helping bing.com customers and Bing API customers to refine their query to match their needs. Two of these operators  – filetype: and ext: – appear to be same but there are subtle differences.  Let’s review each to better understand them. filetype: One of the most commonly used operators is filetype: which enables you to filter documents based on their particular filetype...
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Tools to manager SEO work, keyword research and analytics

This week we’ll tackle something everyone talks about and many spend far too much time searching for.  Tools.  Tools for seo work, keyword research and analytics tools. The lists below are by no means comprehensive.  There are some obvious tools missing from the keyword research and analytics lists, for example.  And we’re not endorsing any of the third party tools in these lists.  We did want to...
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SEO has a future - just be ready to learn

We were at SMX East today, speaking on a panel with some really smart minds on the future of SEO.  In that discussion, many ideas where brought forward.  Let’s take a look at a few of them here. Learning new things is nothing, er…new, to SEOs.  It’s a fact of life for any SEO.  But have you started to dig into the areas that are going to matter?  Have you started working on things today, to set yourself...
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Psychology of Search

Social is here to stay, obviously.  But why?  What does “social” give us that makes it worth such attention? It’s all about human needs. Maslow summed it up.  We need to cover five main areas to function and be satisfied.  His order is, from the bottom up: Physiological Safety Love/belonging Esteem Self-actualization Social fits into four of those, and potentially even the 5th one if you include...
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Indexing issues? Let's examine the most common problems.

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...
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Assigning and understanding value

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...
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How to Verify that Bingbot is Bingbot

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...
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Four areas of search and social focus

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...
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Get more useful metrics out of your Site Dashboard in Webmaster Tools

Yesterday we released a change to the way we calculate % Change in the Site Activity widget in the Bing Webmaster Tools Dashboard section. For the metrics Clicks from search, Appeared in search, Pages crawled, and Crawl errors we will now show you the percent change for the selected date range (as selected in the date selector near the top of the dashboard) compared to the prior date range of the same length.  So when you log into your Bing...
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How to create search friendly content

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...
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