Bing at SMX Advanced 2012 - don't miss these sessions

It seems like only a short time ago we were last at SMX Advanced.  One year ago we were telling you to get busy with Schema.org (and you still should).  Honey Badger was in da house, which saw us updating our tools and adding new features like Crawl Control, Index Explorer and User Management.  Yep, it was a great show! Are you ready to do it all over again? Obviously we’ll bring new favors to the party.  In addition to...
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Moving domains: avoiding the pitfalls

It makes you want to crawl under a rock.  The day your boss comes to you and says “We’re looking at a new domain name.  Can you help us move to it?”  Worse are the days like that which pass you by because no one ever came to you, and it’s only in the panic of dwindling search traffic that people darken your door to ask the resident SEOgre what happened. You instantly know what happened, every nuances of a...
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Penguins & Pandas Poetry

Animal kingdom hurting ROI?Pandas and penguins, oh my!Take control and tell the fauna “Bye Bye”,With these helpful suggestions to diversify! In short, it’s time to fear nothing when building your website.  Every business has decisions to make, and adding more to the mix never makes life easier.  But what are you to do?  You cannot control when a search engine makes an update, or what that update will impact. ...
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Four under-utilized Webmaster Tools features

This week we’re going to take a quick look at four features which often go unused by websites.  Not exactly sure why this is, as they’re very useful, and at times, critical.  Still, we see folks time and again who open an account, verify their domain, yet fail to take basic actions that can help them both immediately and down the road. Preferences Under preferences you’ll find the ability to control whether we email you...
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To crawl or not to crawl, that is BingBot's question

If you are reading this column, there is a good chance you publish quality content to your web site, which you would like to get indexed by Bing.   Usually, things go smoothly: BingBot visits your web site and indexes your content, which then appears in our search results and generates traffic to your site. You are happy, Bing is happy and the searcher is happy. However, things do not always go so smoothly. Sometimes BingBot gets really...
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Better than canonical; URL Normalization

At Bing, we have to crawl and index The Internet and The Internet is pretty big. One common question that Fabrice Canel, a veteran of search here, is commonly asking people is to figure out how big the Internet is?  How many URLs are out-there? The answers that come back fluctuate from “a few thousand” (ok you clearly don’t use The Internet), a few million (ok good start, plenty of people on Facebook, but please continue...
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Video killed the radio star, but we still want your videos

Feeds allow Bing to easily learn about the videos on your website. The purpose is to help Bing include your video content in the Bing index, which may not have otherwise been discovered by Bing’s web content crawlers.  Submitting a feed provides you with a higher assurance that your videos will be included in the index in a more complete and timely manner.   In addition, the feed can provide Bing with rich descriptions (i...
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Implementing Markup For Paginated And Sequenced Content

Late last week I bumped into David Flink, one of our Lead Program Managers here at Bing and after a brief chat, he agreed to write this week’s blog post detailing a view on implementing paganation solutions.  He’s even agreed to field questions, so feel free to post up with questions related to this blog post and David can chime in with answers. Traditionally, Bing has relied on a set of heuristics to determine if and how...
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8 Social and SEO myths reviewed

Last week I participated in an #seochat.  One comment that someone took exception with was the idea of how “authority” is defined.  Essentially, this person took exception with the notion that to be seen as an authority, you need to maintain a healthy follower/following ratio.  Specifically, they argued they knew plenty of people with equal numbers in both columns and each column in the tens of thousands, and that those...
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4 things you may not know about Bing Webmaster tools and 1 about Bingbot

Keyword research tool Our organic keyword research tool is live and a great way to do keyword research.  What makes this tool different is the data source.  Instead of pulling from the paid advertising side and their attendant tools, we’ve built ours to run on organic search query volumes from Bing.  You simply type in your phrase, determine if you want an exact match to the phrase by selecting “strict” and hit the...
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