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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A caption (also known as a summary) is the area of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) devoted to a particular result. Captions help users to decide which result to click on and help site owners to communicate to users what to expect on their page. Captions are an oft-forgotten tool of the SEO toolkit. Ranking is certainly the most important factor in determining user clicks, but captions are also a contributor. In this post, I will give you a...
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In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas.  The first area is Crawl-Delay:   Today, we fully support crawl delay which is specified in robots.txt.  We are considering creating a tool which allows you to directly control the frequency, and...
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Early this month, in the Bingbot is Coming to Town blog post, we provided details about the impending change from msnbot to bingbot.  It’s almost October 1st, so we thought we’d send out a quick reminder that this change is still in the works. Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit. Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout.  What does that mean to...
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Thinking I’d be original, I first titled this post, “Changes, they are a-coming”.  When I Bing’d that title, I realized that ‘original’ isn’t the correct descriptor . . . so, I went searching for inspiration to aid in finding words to convey the importance and need for change, and came up with some great quotes, a few of my favorites: “Everything changes and nothing remains still” –...
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Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1st, 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details, what the change means in terms of...
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In our continuing efforts to provide great value to our publishers, the Bing Engineering team is constantly testing new features to improve crawl efficiency. Such experiments are vital to our ability to innovate and improve our end user and publisher experience. Due to an upcoming experiment, a few sites may encounter an intermittent increase (anywhere from 5% to 25%) in crawl requests from MSNBot over the next month (specifically from August...
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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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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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