Translator widget: Delivering your site to the world

About eight months back, the Microsoft Research Translator team delivered an entirely unique way of delivering your website’s pages to visitors who speak a different language with no development effort on your part. Unlike any other translation widget/gadget available at that time, the Translator widget was unique in that it kept your audience on your site, rather than redirecting them to a proxy translation service. Since then, thousands of...
Read More

Temporary glitch for adding sites to Webmaster tools

As some of you may have experienced, our “Add a site” page has been unavailable in some locales for the past several days. This is not a site-wide or even a global issue.  Unfortunately, this happened due to an update that uncovered a bug in the original code, which caused us to disable the page in one of our data centers. The good news is that we are testing a fix now and will be releasing it to production just as soon as we are...
Read More

How Microsoft handles bots clicking on ads

There’s been some recent discussion in the SEO blogosphere asserting that Bing clicks its own adCenter ads. This has created some misunderstanding. Let’s take a moment to clarify what is actually happening, and what this really means for webmasters and advertisers. The Bing team is aware of an issue shared by all search engines: paid advertising links on sites are, on occasion, crawled and indexed by search engines. Standard practice...
Read More

Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot

Search engines, such as Bing, need to regularly crawl websites not only  to  index new content, but also to check for content changes and removed content. Bing offers webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to accommodate web server load issues. The use of such a setting is not always needed nor is it generally recommended, but it is available for use by webmasters should the need arise. Websites that are small (page-wise) and...
Read More

Bing and Yahoo! team up on search

We hope Wednesday’s announcement of the new search and advertising partnership with Yahoo! is just the first step in a journey that will provide more choice to consumers, better value to our customers, and more innovation by enabling efficiencies and integration within our Search and Search Advertising businesses. As of now, things here will remain status quo. There will be no immediate changes to our ongoing work because of this...
Read More

New bot work continues at Bing

Back in December of 2008, we alerted you to the possibility that you might start seeing our new web crawler in your referrer logs. Given the recent excitement around the arrival of Bing, we wanted to take a moment to update you on the latest bot news. As we said earlier, you will see the new Bing crawler user agent string listed as: msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm). Note that we didn’t change the bot’s name for Bing...
Read More

New tools for webmasters in the Bing Toolbox

Today we’re really excited to announce the arrival of the Bing Toolbox, a new portal for all you Bing webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers out there. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to our Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums. The Toolbox provides everything you need to work with Bing in one place—as well as the site you’ll want to regularly visit...
Read More

Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS

I guess you can’t RT useful and interesting blog articles as easily as you can tweets, so I’m writing here today to pass on the latest news from our teammates in the Bing Developer Center. They’ve just released the updated Bing API Web Page Error Toolkit. I’ll be talking about custom 404 error pages on this blog soon, but for those who want a head-start on the subject, be sure to check out the Developer Center blog post...
Read More

Updating the Webmaster Center RSS feed provider

Another short post today. The Webmaster Center team has updated its RSS feed provider. If you use our RSS feed to keep up with the latest and greatest news from the Bing Webmaster Center team, please update your RSS feed today! Thanks! — Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
Read More

Bing keeps the web safe with malware filter

We at Bing absolutely believe that security is one of our top priorities. We will keep investing in security, as one of our primary goals is to protect and secure our users and provide them with a safe search experience. What have we noticed in Bing? Over the last year, we have seen an increase in social engineering malware. Malware providers mostly target popular search queries on antivirus products, free software downloads, and related technical...
Read More