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 conversations. While those policy updates have helped reduce the amount of spam from past levels, we've received enough feedback and requests to persuade us that we need to do a bit more. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate our existing policies on comment spam and introduce some policy updates that we hope will further improve the experience and value our community derives from perusing the user comments we receive.
Starting on May 24th, 2010, the Bing community blogs and forums will observe the following policies on comments:
Our goal is to improve the value of the community by improving the value of the content it contains. We look to minimize the disruption that comment spam introduces into the community. We want to encourage everyone to participate in the Bing community! The things we do not want (and neither do our readers) are unwanted sales pitches, off-topic comments, inappropriate language, or irrelevant backlinks that cloud the environment for this growing community of users.
Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to reading even more of your comments in the Bing community!
-- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Editor's note: Wezley, one of the commentors below, asked for some clarifications that I wanted to capture here. Since the big problem with comment spam is with gratuitous and irrelevant backlinks (especially in signatures), follow Wezley's lead by putting your backlinks in your Bing community profile page and leaving them out of your comments. Since your Bing community name is linked to your community profile, any visitor to the blog can visit your profile to find and follow your backlinks (where rel="nofollow" is not used, unlike here in the blog comments). It's a win-win idea for everyone! Thanks, Wezley! --Rick
Will that include:
-The Link to our profile
-Signature links
-Profile links
?
Thanks.
In our continued effort to improve the community experience for all users, we are updating our spam policy
In most of the boards I've been to, they have laid down rules, which are located on the same sites. But yours points to: help.live.com/Help.aspx . Don't you think it's more reasonable to have this "Code of Conduct" within www.bing.com/community?
I'm glad to hear that the spam issue is being addressed. Hopefully the implementation of these features will help reduce it. However, I agree with Quality Directory that these guidelines should be available on the forums, preferably before somebody posts, so that they are aware of the rules and regulations. In addition, it would be very helpful if members were asked to read the FAQ's before posting; this would help reduce the number of threads which ask the exact same question. The introduction of nofollow will hopefully get rid of a large number of spammers who are very clearly here just to get backlinks.
Since when is rel="nofollow" associated with the HTML <link> tag?
I think you meant the HTML anchor tag, <a>
londoner,
Doh! Thanks for the catch! I clearly need more caffeine! :-)
Rick DeJarnette
Bing Webmaster Center team
I'm glad to see this implemented and agree that the more visible and accessible these guidelines are, the better. The no follow in comments should (hopefully) get rid of the most egregious spammers.
I am glad to see, to moderate all comments by webmaster for the removal of useless comments..
Wezley,
Good questions! Inline linking to content relevant to the discussion is definitely good (as long as it is not a gratuitous backlink to one’s own site; relevance is key here). Linking to your Bing community profile is perfectly fine. And adding a backlink to your website on your profile page is a great idea for enabling other community members to learn more about you and your work via your site (note that the rel=”nofollow” attribute is not used there).
However, signature backlinks are the real concern. That practice is the primary generator of complaints we get about spam. We ask community members to stop adding irrelevant backlinks to their own sites within blog and forum comments, including in their signatures. The blog and forum moderators reserve the right to flag any excessive abuse of this policy as spam and may edit or delete any such comments.
Thanks for asking!
Hi Rick,
That makes good sense to me. Thanks for the reply.
Glad to see you guys taking action on this, I was starting to get worried that this place was going to get way out of control with spam, but as long you guys are making an effort to keep it clean that is fine by me.
Is "nofollow" applied on signatures links as well?
@novintabligh
Im wondering that too.....
Novintabligh,
Yes, all links anywhere within comments, including in signatures, have the rel="nofollow" attribute applied to them.
The list of policies in this post are not just the new ones. It's an aggregate list of all current comment spam policies, which includes the new ones along with the older ones we already had. This was done to make the list comprehensive (and hopefully less confusing, but perhaps not!).
Actually, the application of the rel="nofollow" attribute to links within comments (and signatures) has been in place for quite some time now. It's mention again here was simply a reminder of that.
Thanks for writing!
我网站的产品有做目录更新，怎么做bing的重新收录呢？
