Search engine optimization (SEO) has three fundamental pillars upon which successful optimization campaigns are run. Like a three-legged stool, take one away, and the whole thing fails to work. The SEO pillars include: content (which we initially discussed in Are you content with your content? ), links (which we covered in Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly , Part 1 and Part 2 ), and last but not least, site architecture. You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines. The search engine web crawler (also...
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 for announcements of cool new features the moment they're ready. This is a first effort and we’ll be building out the site with new content and updated tools as they become available. Please use the forums to give us feedback. Thanks! -- Rick DeJarnette...
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 Customize your 404 error pages with the Bing API Web Page Error Toolkit . Look for the next SEM 101 column shortly! -- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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
In the previous blog post, Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly—Part 1 , I discussed that links are de facto endorsements of the site linked to, that the relevance of the linked to page to the one linking to it is critical for determining the value of the link, and how the quantity vs. quality argument shapes up regarding links. I also defined what is good and bad about each. So let’s pick up where I left off last time in our discussion of the good and bad of linking, and touch on when things can turn ugly. Neighborhoods Search engines do recognize “bad neighborhoods” on the Web. These are places (such as dedicated domains or even IP ranges) that do nothing but set up...
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 queries. Their intent is to game the search engine to show their malware sites as top results for the popular queries. This is done by using various search engine spam techniques (page-level and link-level spam techniques). We have also noticed that...
Lord Alfred Douglas once said, “All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.” He could have just as easily been talking about high-ranking websites (had he known about them — his quote pre-dates the 1920s!). The way to search engine optimization (SEO) success is neither fast nor simple (not that it has to be hard, though). But the accumulation of valuable, relevant, inbound links from authority sites to your site is a sure-fire way to improve your site’s ranking with search engines. Links are an oft-misunderstood commodity in the world of SEO. Do they matter? Sure, if you want to rank highly in search engine results pages...
We have another quick but important announcement today. Bing, along with the other search engines that are a part of Sitemaps.org , has announced support for the following Sitemap enhancements: 1. You can now include up to 50,000 references (either URLs or links to child Sitemaps) in your sitemap.xml index file . Until recently, Sitemap files only supported about 1,000 child references. This enhancement will be very useful to extremely large sites, as now a single, large Sitemap index file, referencing up to 50,000 child Sitemap files, each of which referencing up to 50,000 URLs, can reference up to a total of 2.5 billion URLs. 2. A slight modification of the Sitemaps XSD schemas helps developers...
Quick note on this. We have just released a new white paper titled, Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters . As you might imagine, it covers the key features of Bing from the perspective of webmasters and web publishers. It also delves into how Bing affects your past and future SEO activities. Be forewarned – it is a bit long (I am a veteran tech writer, after all, and I like details and images to illustrate points). I hope you find it informative and useful. You can download it from the Microsoft Download Center in either PDF or XPS document formats. Please take a look! If you have any questions about the content of the new Bing for webmasters white paper, please feel free to post them...
Here at Microsoft, the fun is not just working on interesting projects but sharing interesting results across groups to help our users. And when this information exchange is in the area of security, you just feel elated that you have done the right thing. Thanks to our friends at Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), we were able to publish some interesting data analysis for the security community through Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report (SIR). Bing and Search Security We at Bing believe that search security is one of our top priorities. Our search offering to warn users of Drive-By-Download URLs in their search results has received excellent customer feedback. We detect over...
In Bing, certain navigational queries will provide a “Best match” result at the top. This result also provides several deep links and various contact information associated with the site. Currently, we are working to develop a better support experience for this feature. We hope to have it online within the next few weeks and we will make an announcement when the specific support is available. Meanwhile, if you need to make changes, Please do not use the Content Removal Form. Using that form only removes the full URL from our index and it could have a negative impact on your site. Instead, please contact bestmatc@microsoft.com and we will route it to the team. Thank You. Brett Yount...
This has been an excellent week in Webmaster Center. Our new Bing community forums are alive and vibrant with excellent questions and people who are willing to share their knowledge. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated. We look forward to your continued participation going forward! I’ve received a couple great questions on the forums lately and, although we have posted on a few of these topics in the past, I think it is time to expand on one of those topics. Removing URLs from the index In our earlier blog post , we provided instructions on how to request URL removals. The previous post indicated that the page must be rendered unavailable to the...
As you may have noticed, Bing is live today as a preview. The site will be fully deployed by Wednesday. Be sure to go to www.bing.com and check out for yourself all of the new features and functionality of the new search engine. It’s pretty cool stuff. We’re also excited to welcome you today to the new home of the Webmaster Center blog and forums , as part of the new Bing Community site. Welcome! The old URLs are now automatically redirecting visitors to this new site, but be sure to update your Favorites listing in your browser to the new site. Also note that we’re working on a series of new blog posts that explains what the release of Bing means to webmasters and publishers...
