Office.com SEO: search engine-friendly URLs

Editor’s note: In our continuous effort to make this blog as compelling as possible to our large and diverse audience, we are expanding the scope of the Bing Webmaster Center blog. Starting with this post, we will host occasional posts from “guest bloggers” from within Microsoft who work on search or use search-related technologies in their daily jobs. They will offer the perspective of a user of search engine optimization (SEO...
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Bing Query Language Guide available

I have a quick post today. The Bing Developer Center blog recently published an informative post on using the Bing Advanced Query Language. The guide they reference covers a deep dive into search command operators with detailed descriptions and examples. I thought this might be of interest to the webmaster community as well, so I am posting a link to it here. For more information, check out the post Guide to Bing Query Language Published...
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Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon

Since our last post in November, the Bing team has been busy rolling out improvements to the Bing web crawler. As a result of this work, we want to announce in advance our plans to change the name of our crawler (aka user agent). Out of beta with a new name On October 1st, 2010, we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft’s new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 5 (SEM 101)

This is the last of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review (Part 1), then took an initial look at page-level issues (Part 2), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues (Part 4), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this last post, we'll look at additional, architectural issues that should also be examined...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 4 (SEM 101)

This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review (Part 1), then took an initial look at page-level issues (Part 2), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues (Part 3), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site...
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An SMX sneak-peek at the new Bing Webmaster Tools

The wait is over (almost!). After gathering much appreciated feedback from our valued customers over the past year, the Bing Webmaster team held a session today at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle where we showed a preview of the next version of Bing Webmaster Tools, our no-cost toolset for webmasters and search engine optimizers (SEOs). Bing Webmaster Tools were rebuilt from the ground up to offer more data, including a new user interface and...
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Is your site ranking rank? Do a site review – Part 3 (SEM 101)

Let's continue our run-down of issues to consider in a site review. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the whats and whys for doing a site review, and covered baselining pre-optimized performance and gathering tools. Part 2 covered important but often overlooked on-page issues that, if not properly addressed, can prove detrimental to a site's performance, both for search engine ranking as well as for usability and discoverability for...
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Smarter 404 pages on WordPress with Bing

In this blog, we’ve previously discussed matters relating to custom 404 pages in Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations (SEM 101), returning the correct HTTP status code with your custom 404 pages in 301 to 404 gets 200 – oops! (From the Forums), and using Bing toolkits to develop such pages in Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS. Earlier this week we announced one of the results of our recent collaboration with Cal Evans, PHP...
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Announcing the Bing Search Library for PHP

I have a quick announcement today. The Bing Developer Center team today published a new blog post that announced the availability of the new Bing Search Library for PHP, created by PHP guru Cal Evans. The new tool is available under an open source BSD license. The Bing Search Library for PHP provides a simple way to submit queries to and retrieve results from the Bing Engine. The tool comes with a tutorial that includes sample code for PHP...
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A king’s feast of video content, thanks to mRSS

One of the oldest truisms of Internet search is the familiar axiom, “content is king.” But while that’s great in concept, the premise only goes so far in reality. If your site is rich in text-based content, which is easily crawled and indexed by search engine bots, that content can stand on the merits of its relevance and value in earning you appropriate page ranking. But this is 2010; text is not the only game in town. What if...
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