A caption (also known as a summary) is the area of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) devoted to a particular result. Captions help users to decide which result to click on and help site owners to communicate to users what to expect on their page. Captions are an oft-forgotten tool of the SEO toolkit. Ranking is certainly the most important factor in determining user clicks, but captions are also a contributor. In this post, I will give you a...
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In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas.  The first area is Crawl-Delay:   Today, we fully support crawl delay which is specified in robots.txt.  We are considering creating a tool which allows you to directly control the frequency, and...
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Early this month, in the Bingbot is Coming to Town blog post, we provided details about the impending change from msnbot to bingbot.  It’s almost October 1st, so we thought we’d send out a quick reminder that this change is still in the works. Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit. Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout.  What does that mean to...
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Thinking I’d be original, I first titled this post, “Changes, they are a-coming”.  When I Bing’d that title, I realized that ‘original’ isn’t the correct descriptor . . . so, I went searching for inspiration to aid in finding words to convey the importance and need for change, and came up with some great quotes, a few of my favorites: “Everything changes and nothing remains still” –...
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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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In our continuing efforts to provide great value to our publishers, the Bing Engineering team is constantly testing new features to improve crawl efficiency. Such experiments are vital to our ability to innovate and improve our end user and publisher experience. Due to an upcoming experiment, a few sites may encounter an intermittent increase (anywhere from 5% to 25%) in crawl requests from MSNBot over the next month (specifically from August...
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Today, we are announcing the release of new features for the Bing Webmaster tools. These features are a direct response to feedback we’ve received since our launch last month which was announced in Anthony’s “A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools” blog post. The loudest feedback was, “I want to download my data!” . . . so, we’ve added a new data export capability which enables you to export and download...
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In my last post, I started digging in to the many great new features offered in the new Bing Webmaster Tools. We have so much to talk about that I needed two posts to cover it! Let’s get right back in the saddle and ride this horse back home. Note: As in the Tips and Tricks Part 1 post, the features I discuss here are primarily based on the Silverlight version of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. While there is a basic, down level version of...
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I trust by now everyone has heard the big news: the new Bing Webmaster Tools are here! I have been working with it for quite some time now. I like the new look and feel of the Silverlight-based user interface. It is clean, intuitive, and easy to use. As the primary contributor to the tool’s documentation, I’ve had some interesting discoveries as the tools were developed, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some...
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Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing. So what’s new in...
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