Blogs

Authority is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere”. For our purposes, we also understand that “authority” conveys a sense of trust and influence. Searchers generally want authoritative sources to engage with. They want to be able to trust the sources they visit. Naturally, this means being an authority ranks pretty high on the “must do...
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Since our June 2012 re-launch of Bing Webmaster Tools, many webmasters, site owners, and search marketers like yourself have joined our program and use the tools to stay up-to-date on how their web site is performing in Bing and Bing-powered search results. Millions of content publisher share their Sitemaps, Parameters to Ignore, and Crawl Preferences with us, allowing their websites to shine on Bing.com, Yahoo!, and other places powered by Bing —...
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In today’s edition of the Bing Index Quality blog we will delve into one particular spamming technique – MGC (short for ‘machine generated content’.) We will discuss what it is, why & how spammers employ it and introduce a specific update we shipped a few months ago aimed at detecting and filtering out pages utilizing this technique. What is MGC and why/ how spammers employ it? As we mentioned in the Web Spam Filtering overview blog from...
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I blame the meta keywords tag.  That little so-and-so started all this.  Well, the “tag” and a few crafty humans, really. The idea was pretty simple. If the keyword appeared in the meta keywords tag, the page was relevant to the topic. And, on the surface, this was a solid idea. Something useful to the systems, yet invisible to the average person. Alas, with a simple right-click, the beginnings of modern day search optimization was born. “What if...
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Protecting Bing users from malware is a top priority for the Index Quality team. To that end, we analyze every signal available to us and determine not only whether the page is infected, but also whether it runs at a high risk of infection at a future date. One of the key elements of this analysis is discovering clues about potential vulnerabilities on the ‘container’ hosting the page that could be exploited by malware distributors to spread their...
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As we alluded to in last week’s Index Quality blog, today’s update will focus on one specific spam filtering mechanism we rolled out a few months ago that targets a common spam technique known as URL keyword stuffing (KWS.) What is URL KWS? Like any other black hat technique, the goal of URL KWS, at a high level, is to manipulate search engines to give the page a higher rank than it truly deserves. The underlying idea unique to URL KWS relies on...
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As I mentioned in the July 15 blog introducing Bing Index Quality, one of the key dimensions of our work is web spam detection and filtering. The overview of our approach to this complex problem will be the focus of today’s update. What is web spam? On the surface, our definition is fairly straightforward and intuitive. We think of a webpage as spam if its owner uses black hat SEO techniques in an effort to game our search algorithms with the goal...
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Today’s new businesses have much in common with their older counterparts. The need to acquire new leads, drive revenue, market their product or service. The need to manage overhead, do more with less and stay one step ahead of the competition. So from, say 1974 to 2014, some things haven’t changed much. One thing you never started a business without “back in the day” was a business plan. And that same thinking should be in place today, but in a...
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The Bing/Inc Roadshow is coming to an end. It’s been a jam packed tour for the last 4 events in Nashville, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston, with capacity crowds, excellent questions and easy access to answers. The panel, with industry heavyweights such as Maisha Walker of Message Medium, Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc, Marty Weintraub of aimClear (and myself) is set to meet up again during the final road show event in Houston, Texas. It promises to be...
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Malware, and the possibility of infection, is an unfortunate reality facing internet users today. At Bing, we take our job of providing a safe searching experience to our customers very seriously and this anti-malware effort is one of the core elements of the Bing Index Quality charter. We’ve been in this game for many years and have developed comprehensive solutions that minimize user’s risk of infection and maintain the integrity of our index...
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