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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...

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...

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...

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 1 st , 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...

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...

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 1 st , 2010. We also...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

We in the Bing Webmaster Center team are very fortunate to have such a bright, vibrant, and helpful community of users in our Webmaster Center forums . From time to time, I will take a moment to highlight some useful and interesting threads found in the forums in this new blog column. The goal of this...

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...

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...

What is spam? One could argue that spam is a multi-faceted thing. The word itself has many definitions. For example, it can be defined as a processed spiced ham and pork slathered with a gelatinous glaze food product found in a tin (it's apparently very popular in Hawai'i, don't you know?). However,...

We still get many questions in our blog comments, even though we try to encourage our readers to post their questions to our Webmaster Center forums (which are actually staffed to answer your questions!). I do look through the blog comments every day and delete those that are junk (those that are empty...

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...