With cloud services such as Windows Azure now a viable alternative to traditional web hosting, numerous webmasters have reached out to us to ask if, and how, Bing uses the document location as a part of its ranking algorithm. In other words: does cloud-based web hosting outside of the document’s intended geography negatively impact a document’s ranking?  Though it’s only one of over a thousand features we consider in...
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With cloud services such as Windows Azure now a viable alternative to traditional web hosting, numerous webmasters have reached out to us to ask if, and how, Bing uses the document's location as a part of its ranking algorithm. In other words: does cloud-based web hosting outside of the document intended geography negatively impact a document's ranking?
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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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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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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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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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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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Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web (such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit!), you're ready to start...
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In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away. The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question. It was soon...
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The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can’t wait to share with you (patience, Grasshopper – all will be revealed in time). But the blog waits for no one (well, that’s the intent, anyway). From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it’s that time again. So let’s get to it. Q: I...
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