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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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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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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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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The Bing blogs and forums team are grateful for the growing participation and readership of our user community. We’ve worked hard over the past year to provide compelling content that will help our users get the most out of the Bing experience. We sincerely hope that our readers and participants continue to find value in the content we produce! The reader comments left in the Bing blogs and forums have always been governed by our published...
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Just a quick note for today. While we’ve been busy working on the new series of web spam blog articles, we were also busy working on updating the recently compiled Webmaster Center FAQ (as described in the blog announcement New Webmaster Center FAQ available) with even more content. While some might call it new and improved, I just claim that it’s bigger with more information (hmmm — I guess it is new and improved!). The...
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Everybody loves a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ). They often include tidbits of knowledge that are not easily found elsewhere, or present information in ways that often make it more understandable. The Webmaster Center team has been working hard to present more useful content through the team blog in recent months. We already have a FAQ of sorts through the Webmaster Center Help (see the Help system’s left hand navigation for the...
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In August, we alerted webmasters to the news from the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team of the beta 1 release of their excellent new tool, the IIS SEO Toolkit. The public response we received was very enthusiastic and supportive. In response to many requests, we followed that up with a more detailed article explaining how the new tool is installed as an extension of IIS 7. Since that time, the tool was refreshed in a beta 2...
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Did you hear the news? Bing was recently upgraded with another set of exciting end-user features. Instead of reciting the long list of changes here, I’ll just point you to the blog post in the Bing Search blog titled, “Bing’s Next Chapter Begins Today.” The Bing engineering team has been focused on improving the already cool features that have made using Bing so much fun. One edit to the Bing home page has changed the way...
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The Bing team has been talking about its new crawler (aka bot), MSNBot 2.0b, in this blog for quite some time now. We have made numerous improvements in its performance, addressed some webmaster concerns, and published detailed information on how to control the bot with a robots.txt file. Today we are announcing that the new bot is fully operational. This development will enable Bing to do a better job at gathering the information we need from the...
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