Blogs

You’ve heard us talk about quality quite a bit on this blog and we can all agree that creating quality content is the only sustainable strategy in attracting and retaining visitors. Naturally, as a search engine we always aim to connect our searchers with the best content out there, so content quality plays an important part in our algorithms.  Which brings me to the “recommended reading” part: My colleague Michael Basilyan from...
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As we discussed in Meet our Mobile Bots recently, Bing probes websites using device-specific crawlers to understand if they provide a good experience on different devices and platforms and to inform our mobile ranking algorithms. Today we are joined by Mir Rosenberg from the Mobile Relevance team to add some color to the subject by discussing a recent mobile ranking update that resulted from this effort. Enjoy!  — Vincent Traditionally...
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In today’s post we are joined by Lee Xiong from the Bing Crawl team. Lee is going to discuss some new developments on the crawl front pertaining to mobile SEO.  Enjoy!  – Vincent We can all agree that mobile is the future. Actually, we can’t really say “mobile is the future” anymore. Mobile is the present. Mobile is now. With that in mind, it’s time to take a fresh look at some essential things from the ground up. Specifically, let’s...
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For a limited time, we’re opening up our wallets to new webmasters: receive $100* in advertising credit for verifying your site with Bing Webmaster Tools + opening a new Bing Ads account. Two weeks ago I told you how to get $100* in free advertising credit by becoming a new Bing Ads user if you had a Bing Webmaster Tools account. As it turned out, many of you seized this opportunity to claim your ad credit, just in time for the holiday...
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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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