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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 location as a part of its ranking algorithm. In other words: does cloud-based web hosting outside of the document’s...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft Silverlight is a transformative technology. It enables otherwise basic websites to act as full-blown applications, provides access to state-of-the-art animation and video rich media presentations, and takes full advantage of your development team's existing experience in standard programming...

When I was a kid in high school, I used to go to the public library and do initial research in the Encyclopedia Britannica (yes, the bound book editions. I also remember black & white television with vacuum tubes and rotary telephones! Sheesh, I'm getting old!). I would pick up the index volume that...

In the exciting world of today's Internet, where the world's information is literally at your fingertips, where you can endlessly communicate, shop, research, and be entertained, spam is a big downer. The unwanted email spam that fills our inboxes also consumes huge portions of the available bandwidth...

We've already covered in past blog articles some of the basics about how webmasters can use a file called robots.txt to control how search engine crawlers (aka bots) crawl their websites. But there is so much more to talk about with bots. So let's take a bit of a deeper dive into the subject. Topic 1...

You've seen it. So have I. Nearly every person who has actively browsed the Web for more than 15 minutes has seen it. I'm talking about the dreaded 404 File Not Found error. When it occurs, users simply abandon their search on that site and go elsewhere. That's a potential lost sale, subscription, or...

Malware infections are no laughing matter. When they afflict your website, they can infect your customers, who won’t appreciate your sharing, intentional or not (and I’m guessing it’s not)! And if Bing discovers malware on your site, your listing in the Bing search engine results pages...

We recently published a non-SEM 101 blog post on controlling the crawl rate of MSNBot , the Bing web crawler (aka robot, or simply just bot). That got me thinking about robots. Naturally, that led to The Robot on Lost in Space . Will Robinson , the show’s precocious youngster who was a whiz at...

Have you ever noticed how pirate treasure maps are like Sitemaps? While your website may not contain a treasure of gold and silver (unless it’s a metals commodities trading site!), if you have good content, that is certainly treasure to someone who is looking for it. Unfortunately, it’s buried...

Search engines, such as Bing, need to regularly crawl websites not only  to  index new content, but also to check for content changes and removed content. Bing offers webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to accommodate web server load issues. The use of such a setting is not always...

Imagine being a content developer for a website. You write a bunch of clever and informative articles, which should deliver a good dose of new visitors and ranking potential to the site. You submit them to the IT department for publishing online, and wait for good things to happen. But instead, it all...

The old adage that was once attributed to a Chinese proverb tells us, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But John McCarthy , a noted mathematician and computer science pioneer, stated conversely, “As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.” Perhaps McCarthy...