Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools . After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing. So what’s new in the updated Bing Webmaster Tools? Everything. With your feedback in mind, the Bing Webmaster Team decided to hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up. The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience...
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) services (just like you!) rather than that of a search engine offering prescriptive SEO advice. Let us know what you think and what topics you'd like to see covered in future posts with a comment here. Thanks for being a member of the Bing Webmaster Center community!...
I have a quick post today. The Bing Developer Center blog recently published an informative post on using the Bing Advanced Query Language. The guide they reference covers a deep dive into search command operators with detailed descriptions and examples. I thought this might be of interest to the webmaster community as well, so I am posting a link to it here. For more information, check out the post Guide to Bing Query Language Published . Enjoy! See you again soon! -- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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 1 st , 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 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below: From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com will become From: bingbot...
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 3 and 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 in a site review. Duplicate content conundrums Aside from duplicate indexed content arising from the lack of canonicalization as discussed in Part 4 , sites that use the secure protocol HTTPS can also experience duplicate content in the index...
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 review. Using HTTP redirects When you remove, rename, or relocate a previously published webpage on your web server, do you implement an HTTP redirect on your server to help users find the content they are looking for? If not, you should. Otherwise,...
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 enhanced charting functionality. If you weren't at SMX Advanced today, no worries. You'll get your own opportunity to see the new tools in action yourself in the very near future. What has changed? Actually, a better question is "what didn't change?"...
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 users. In this post, let's examine site review issues that are more site-wide in scope. What is the meaning of this (file name)? Look at your URLs - what do they say about the page's content? Do you use human-friendly page file names or globally unique identifier...
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 guru , in our post Announcing the Bing Search Library for PHP . Well, there's more to announce. The Bing Developer Center blog today announced that we have worked with Cal to distribute a new plug-in for WordPress webmasters, which offers a new way to handle dead...
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 developers . Check it out! Be back soon... -- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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 you have a site filled with video content? That content, while possibly of great value to searchers, is not easily handled by bots. They can't see or read it like you and I can. So if bots have trouble accessing it (often such content is referenced within scripts, which...
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 Code of Conduct policies. Over the past year, we have implemented additional, clarifying policies to help minimize the incidence of irrelevant comment spam in the Bing blog and forums without affecting the ability of our community to contribute to the ongoing...
In 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 looking at what might be preventing you from ranking where you should be. In this post, we'll look at several possible, on-page issues. Focus your aim on targeted keywords Since search engines rank sites based in large part on their relevance to the keywords...
For webmasters who work hard to build and publish their sites, it can be frustrating when their sites are barely indexed and rank poorly across all search engines. They may think, "Why does this happen? What can I do to improve this?" The reasons for poor ranking are nearly as myriad as the number of sites on the Web. Your site may be competing against some very well established, well-designed sites in your industry niche. Your competitors may have published a ton of useful, expert content, or have implemented a blog or forum where all of your industry's customers go for information, thus earning them tons of valuable visitors and backlinks. And frankly, it could be that those competing sites...
Today's forum thread of note is a discussion around what can be done to optimize image content for SEO. Several members of the Bing Webmaster Center forum community have chimed in with helpful advice. What do you do on your site to optimize images? What have you found to be most important when adding images to a website? Join in the conversation! To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out How do we optimize images? Is it necessary to optimize the images? in Webmaster Center's General Questions & Feedback forum . As always, many thanks to everyone who contributed to this forum topic! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our...
