Bing Penguins & Pandas Poetry</h1> <article> <h1>Bing Penguins & Pandas Poetry</h1> <p>2012-05-18T21:57:00Z</p> <p>Animal kingdom hurting ROI?<br />Pandas and penguins, oh my!<br />Take control and tell the fauna "Bye Bye",<br />With these helpful suggestions to diversify!</p> <p>In short, it’s time to fear nothing when building your website. Every business has decisions to make, and adding more to the mix never makes life easier. But what are you to do? You cannot control when a search engine makes an update, or what that update will impact. That much is obvious. But what many websites fail to take action on is forecasting change, preventative work and exercises in the obvious.</p> <p><b>Reality Check</b></p> <p>Algorithms change. Rankings change. Competition happens. The fact is, you need to be prepared. So, when your single biggest source of traffic sudden loses steam, what do you do? If your plan was to make sure your content ranked well across all the major engines, then your plan of action would already be in effect, protecting you from the loss in one area. True, its not an offset that matches what could potentially be lost at the same level, but the option is losing everything and having nothing suddenly.</p> <p>And while you're thinking of diversification as a way to protect your website from future changes, ask yourself this: is search, all up, my primary traffic source? What other sources of traffic should you be cultivating? Social traffic, direct traffic, affiliate driven traffic? Search will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be the major driver of traffic to most websites, but this doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking to other avenues as a way to augment your traffic from search...and potentially protect yourself should a future change upset the balance of rankings in some way. </p> <p>And just to be clear folks, we're all in the same boat. Change happens at all the major engines, and from time to time, those changes don't work well with individual websites, so let's take a look at ways to protect yourself and your business from change. Think of it as future proofing.<br /><br /><b>Forecasting change</b><br /><br />Yes, it’s hard to gaze into the crystal ball and see where things are heading, but if you look back a bit, you often see clues. Search is influenced by social today. Who didn’t see that coming 3+ years ago? Similarly, what’s a best practice in SEO today, could end up a tarnished relic tomorrow. We all remember when the <i><meta description> </i>tag was the be-all-to-end-all. Today…ah, no.<br />The point here is it pays to spend some time thinking about these things. Are you employing any tactics today that could become the next big spam tactic tomorrow? Worse, maybe they’ve already become the next big spam tactic and you’re simply unaware.</p> <p>As an SEO, your job is to dig through the details to find incremental gains. To help fix fundamental problems that block success. And not we’re not taking anything away from the importance of that focus, but you cannot forget to stick your head up and look around every now and then. Sure, this should be done by the Director or VP in your group, but if they lack your level of SEO savvy, they may not make the connections you would. So, as an SEO, it pays to stay on top of the latest trends and watch for broad signals of adoption around new things to help you forecast where to invest next.<br /><br /><b>Preventative work</b><br /><br />This section encompasses all of those projects you know should be done, yet linger unfinished. It even includes things that are less a project and more and ethos for your organization. Sure, your company prides itself on its content, but do they have the skill son hand to truly produce quality content? I don’t mean the ability to make that content appear online, I mean people who know how to write, people who know how to segment an audience to understand what motivates each segment, people who understand the concept of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/02/10/becoming-an-authority-how-to-and-why-you-want-to.aspx">building authority</a>. Building authority is not a passive task that catches up with you, it’s an active process which leads to results.<br /><br />Add to this focusing on the user experience and you have to ask how you’re stocked for usability talent/skills. The technical side cannot be overlooked either, so you’re going to need people covering page load times, integrating new features and so on.<br /><br />The bottom line on this is to be successful in search today, we’re so beyond just SEO that most businesses don’t even realize it. They are standing on the dock wondering when the ship will arrive. They don’t realize it left ages ago and is already over the horizon. Their next best hope to reach the promised land of search/social success is continental drift. Hardly a solid plan.<br /><br /><b>Exercises in the obvious</b><br /><br />Pinterest. It didn’t take long for the <i>Pin It</i> button to start popping up on websites. And it didn’t take a passing grade on the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=mensa+quiz&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=mensa+quiz&sc=8-10&sp=-1&sk=">MENSA quiz</a> to see it coming, did it? Rapid growth, huge adoption, media buzz, your friends recommending it, and so it goes. An exercise in obviousness that you’d better pay attention to this little gem. So what else is obvious?<br /><br />Take a look at your analytics and see where people are entering and leaving your site. Anything you can do to improve retention or page volume consumption? Look through the data and try to spot the trends, because I guarantee you the trends are in the data.<br /><br />Some other obvious stuff stands out, too:</p> <ul> <li>Do you have a webmaster account activated at the engines?</li> <li>How’s your robots.txt file doing? Blocking the right stuff?</li> <li>Got clean sitemaps?</li> <li>Still have duplicate content issues?</li> <li>Have you integrated social sharing features across your site?</li> <li>Got the best practices of SEO covered (remember, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/03/23/does-bing-like-seo-you-bet-your-ahrefs-we-do.aspx">we like SEO</a>…)</li> <li>…and the list goes on.</li> </ul> <p>Seriously folks, if you want to lay a smack down on the animal kingdom that’s taken over your life, you can do it. Get the basics covered, leverage your unique strengths (or create new ones) and focus, like a laser, on the single thing that matters most: <b>your visitors</b>. Get religion on this point and never let go. The engines are very focused on those visitors: what they like, what they dislike, what they click on and what they avoid. We're watching them closely so we can learn what they want and bring exactly that to them every time. You should be, too.</p> <p><b>As your portfolio manager tells you, diversify, diversify, diversify</b></p> <p>If your business suffers when an algo gets tweaked, insulate yourself from that. Any first year marketing student will tell you this: having all your business in one basket is bad news. You need to diversify. When things are ticking along well in one area, start ramping up efforts in another channel. Over time you’ll see metrics increase from all inbound channels, insulating your from dips and spikes in other channels and allowing you time to react, adjust and test ways to rebound.</p> <p>Here’s a great two-part article (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.potpiegirl.com/2012/04/the-art-of-letting-go-of-google/">part 1</a> & <a target="_blank" href="http://www.potpiegirl.com/2012/04/the-real-reason-i-broke-up-with-google/">part 2</a>) I recently came across. They are a bit long, but it’s worth reading them. Yes, there’s a less-than-positive slant against the #1 engine, but she’s very constructive in helping you understand what she did and why she did it. She’s not a nutter who simply blocked an engine to “prove a point”. Oh no, this was a much more savvy, long term approach to ensuring her business remains successful. Bottom line, this is smart business planning and its planning like this that could help protect you from the next critter to crawl your way.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Four under-utilized Webmaster Tools features</h1> <p>2012-05-11T18:02:00Z</p> <p>This week we’re going to take a quick look at four features which often go unused by websites. Not exactly sure why this is, as they’re very useful, and at times, critical. Still, we see folks time and again who open an account, verify their domain, yet fail to take basic actions that can help them both immediately and down the road.</p> <p><b>Preferences</b></p> <p>Under preferences you’ll find the ability to control whether we email you alerts, which alert we email and to which address we email. This may sound like a ploy to get you to sign up for marketing emails…but consider this:</p> <ul> <li>We don’t email you marketing info.</li> <li>We do email you alerts about malware.</li> </ul> <p>Now, this assumes you give us the permission and spec an email address you actually use frequently. Be sure to put in a legitimate email address here, or you could out think yourself and be responsible for missing important alerts like content we can’t reach because your robots.txt is blocking it, or that we’ve found <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/11/11/getting-flagged-as-malware-some-insights.aspx">malware associated with your site</a>. I suspect any savvy SEO would cringe if they realized they were missing those alerts.</p> <p><b>URL Normalization</b></p> <p>For a lot of sites, cleaning up URL-related issues is a pain. Using the <i>URL Normalization</i> feature found inside our Webmaster Tools can help you, however. If you put the parameter you’d like us to ignore into the tool, we’ll do just that – ignore the parameter. In short, we’ll ignore the URL in which the parameter appears, and the content associated with the parameter.</p> <p>If you do not want us to be indexing your /print/ content, then specifying print in the <i>URL Normalization</i> feature will alert us and will help us understand we should not index that content. URL Normalization does not replace your robots.txt, and you should take care to not put contradictory statements in these two locations. Robots.txt has the final say, so be careful.</p> <p><b>Users</b></p> <p>This feature is extremely valuable. Let’s look at two examples of why.</p> <p>In our first example, you’d like to allow access to view the data inside the Webmaster account with a senior manager. You can easily do so through the features in the <i>User </i>section. You can control what that manager can access as well. By selecting <i>Read Only</i>, they can see everything but change nothing. Great protection when allowing those new into the tools space.</p> <p>In our second example, we’ll focus on protection at a much more fundamental level. Let’s say your SEO has left the company. Do you have your <i>User </i>parameters set in such a way as to protect you against that ex-employee logging back into the tools and telling Bing to block your entire website? That employee may not have access to YOUR network and YOUR computers any more, but they could still log into the Webmaster account and cause some damage there. Make sure you have at least two <i>Administrators </i>set up who then can control what all other users can access. If any employee who had access to the Webmaster Tools leaves your company, one of those alternate <i>Administrators </i>can login and change passwords for everyone, etc. There are limits to this protecting you, but the tools exist to manage access. The rest is in your hands to plan.</p> <p><b>URL Submissions</b></p> <p>We hear a lot of folks saying they don’t see their newest content in the results fast enough. They are concerned we’re not finding it, not crawling them frequently enough, etc. In addition to submitting sitemaps via our tools, you can also submit, directly to our index, any URL from your site. Now, there are limits on these submissions (50/month and 10/day) to protect Bing against spammers trying to inject content. But, for a legitimate website, this feature is an excellent way to make sure valuable content is seen by us quickly.</p> <p>You have to understand, however, that with this power to submit the content can come some potentially harsh realities. Unlike the normal process of crawling, indexing, rating and ranking that content goes through, what you submit takes a much straighter path to the results page. This means that while you might feel your content is the best content ever created, the searcher is the ultimate judge. If your content is shown, and searchers interact with it, that helps the content (which is new to us and has virtually no signals of its own at this point – no history, no pattern of engagement, no social signals, etc.).</p> <p>This means that your content sinks or swims based on whether or not searchers interact with it. If they do, and we sense their interactions are positive, you’re in great shape. If they don’t, that’s a strike. If they do and we get the sense they don’t like it, that’s a strike. The bottom line here is your content needs to be very compelling to be successful. And just because you think its compelling, that doesn’t means others will, too.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing To crawl or not to crawl, that is BingBot's question</h1> <p>2012-05-03T23:39:00Z</p> <p>If you are reading this column, there is a good chance you publish quality content to your web site, which you would like to get indexed by Bing. Usually, things go smoothly: BingBot visits your web site and indexes your content, which then appears in our search results and generates traffic to your site. You are happy, Bing is happy and the searcher is happy.</p> <p>However, things do not always go so smoothly. Sometimes BingBot gets really excited about your quality content and ends up crawling your web site beyond all expectations, digging deeper and harder than you otherwise wanted. Sometimes you did everything you could to promote your quality content but BingBot still does not visit your site.</p> <p>As much as <em>robots.txt</em> is a reference tool to control BingBot’s behavior, it is also a double-edged sword that may be interpreted in a way that disallows (or allows) much more than you thought initially. In this column, we will go through the most common <em>robots.txt</em> directives supported by Bing, highlighting a few of their pitfalls, as seen in real-life feedback over the past few months.</p> <p><strong>Where does BingBot look for my robots.txt file?</strong></p> <p>For a given page, BingBot looks at the root of the host for your <em>robots.txt</em> file. For example, in order to determine if it is allowed to crawl the following page (and at which rate):</p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://us.contoso.com/products.htm">http://us.contoso.com/products.htm</a></p> <p>BingBot will fetch and analyze your <em>robots.txt</em> file at:</p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://us.contoso.com/robots.txt">http://us.contoso.com/robots.txt</a></p> <p>Note that the host here is the full subdomain (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx/us.contoso.com">us.contoso.com</a>), not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx/contoso.com">contoso.com </a>nor <a target="_blank" href="http://www.contoso.com">www.contoso.com</a>. This means that if you have multiple subdomains, BingBot must be able to fetch <em>robots.txt</em> at the root of each one of them, even if all these <em>robots.txt</em> files are the same. In particular, if a <em>robots.txt</em> file is missing from a subdomain, BingBot will not try to fall back to any other file in your domain, meaning it will consider itself allowed anywhere on the subdomain. BingBot does not “assume” directives from other hosts which have a <em>robots.txt</em> in place, associated with a domain.</p> <p><strong>When does BingBot look for my robots.txt file?</strong></p> <p>Because it would cause a lot of unwanted traffic if BingBot tried to fetch your <em>robots.txt</em> file every single time it wanted to crawl a page on your website, it keeps your directives in memory for a few hours. Then, on an ongoing basis, it tries to fetch your <em>robots.txt</em> file again to see if anything changed.</p> <p>This means that any change you put in your <em>robots.txt</em> file will be honored only after BingBot fetches the new version of the file, which could take a few hours if it was fetched recently.</p> <p><strong>Which directives does BingBot honor?</strong></p> <p>If there is no specific set of directives for the bingbot or msnbot user agent, then BingBot will honor the default set of directives, defined with the wildcard user agent. For example:</p> <p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"><span style="font-size: small;">User-Agent: *<br />Disallow: /useless_folder</span></span></p> <p>In most cases, you want to tell all search engines the URL paths where you want them to crawl, and the URL paths you want them to not crawl. Also, maintaining only one default set of directives for all search engines is less error-prone and is our recommendation.</p> <p><strong>What if I want to allow only BingBot?</strong></p> <p>In your <em>robots.txt</em> file, you can choose to define individual sections based on user agent. For example, if you want to authorize only BingBot when others crawlers are disallowed, you can do this by including the following directives in your <em>robots.txt</em> file: </p> <p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"><span style="font-size: small;">User-Agent: *<br />Disallow: /</span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"><span style="font-size: small;">User-Agent: bingbot<br />Allow: /</span></span></p> <p>A key rule to remember is that BingBot honors only one set of directives, in this order of priority:</p> <ul> <li>The section for the bingbot user agent, discarding everything else.</li> <li>The section for the msnbot user agent (for backwards compatibility), discarding everything else.</li> <li>The default section (wildcard user agent).</li> </ul> <p>This rule has two main consequences in terms of what BingBot will be allowed to crawl (or not):</p> <ul> <li>If you have a specific set of directives for the bingbot user agent, BingBot will ignore all the other directives in the <em>robots.txt</em> file. Therefore, if there is a default directive that should apply to BingBot as well, you must copy it to the bingbot section in order for BingBot to honor it.</li> <li>If you have a specific set of directives for the msnbot user agent (but not for the bingbot user agent), BingBot will honor these. In particular, if you have old directives blocking MSNBot, you are also blocking BingBot altogether as a side effect. The most common example is:</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"><span style="font-size: small;">User-agent: msnbot<br />Disallow: /</span></span></p> <p><strong>Does BingBot honor the Crawl-delay directive?</strong></p> <p>Yes, BingBot honors the <em>Crawl-delay</em> directive, whether it is defined in the most specific set of directives or in the default one – that is an important exception to the rule defined above. This directive allows you to throttle BingBot and set, indirectly, a cap to the number of pages it will crawl.</p> <p>One common mistake is that <em>Crawl-delay</em> does not represent a crawl rate. Instead, it defines the size of a time window (from 1 to 30 seconds) during which BingBot will crawl your web site only once. For example, if your crawl delay is 5, BingBot will slice the day in smaller five-second windows, crawling only one page (or none) in each of these, for a maximum of around 17,280 pages during the day.</p> <p>This means the higher your crawl delay is, the fewer pages BingBot will crawl. As crawling fewer pages may result in getting less content indexed, we usually do not recommend it, although we also understand that different web sites may have different bandwidth constraints.<br />Importantly, if your web site has several subdomains, each having its own <em>robots.txt</em> file defining a <em>Crawl-delay</em> directive, BingBot will manage each crawl delay separately. For example, if you have the following directive for both <em>robots.txt</em> files on <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx/us.contoso.com">us.contoso.com</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.contoso.com">www.contoso.com</a>:</p> <p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"><span style="font-size: small;">User-agent: *<br />Crawl-delay: 1</span></span></p> <p>Then BingBot will be allowed to crawl one page at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx/us.contoso.com">us.contoso.com</a> and one page at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.contoso.com">www.contoso.com</a> during each one-second window. Therefore, this is something you should take into account when setting the crawl delay value if you have several subdomains serving your content.</p> <p><strong>My robots.txt file looks good… what else should I know?</strong></p> <p>There are some other mechanisms available for you to control BingBot’s behavior. One of them is to define hourly crawl rates through the Bing Webmaster Tools (see the Crawl Settings section). This is particularly useful when your traffic is very cyclical during the day and you would like BingBot to visit your web site more outside of peak hours. By adjusting the graph up or down, you can apply a positive or negative factor to the crawl rate automatically determined by BingBot. This fine tunes the crawl activity to be more or less at a given time of the day, all controlled by you. It is important to note that a crawl delay noted in your <em>robots.txt</em> file will override the direction set within the Bing Webmaster Tool, so plan carefully to ensure you are not sending BingBot contradictory messages.</p> <p></p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Better than canonical; URL Normalization</h1> <p>2012-04-27T21:30:00Z</p> <p>At Bing, we have to crawl and index The Internet and The Internet is pretty big. One common question that Fabrice Canel, a veteran of search here, is commonly asking people is to figure out how big the Internet is? How many URLs are out-there? </p> <p>The answers that come back fluctuate from “a few thousand” (ok you clearly don’t use The Internet), a few million (ok good start, plenty of people on Facebook, but please continue thinking), a few billion (more than 1 billion people are using the internet and having some kind of profile page set). This is all good thinking, but keep going. A few trillion, maybe? (Well, now the numbers are becoming so huge that they have <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion">different meanings per country</a>.) After a while, some talented people get it right: the real number of URLs on the Internet is “infinity”. </p> <p>The Internet is so huge that we can crawl forever discovering new links. Not only regular, good content but also plenty of unexpected content; not necessarily relevant for search engines, such as a “Next Day” link in a calendar hosted in web pages, keyword tag cloud links, etc. The list is almost endless.</p> <p>Webmasters can help the search engines and themselves by removing useless and duplicate content from the crawler’s path – make sure we don’t see it. Guiding search engines to your most relevant pages and helping them to discard less relevant pages is an SEO recipe for success. We have a couple blog posts related to this idea that “less is more”, such as our blog post on <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/01/19/optimizing-your-very-large-site-for-search-part-1.aspx">optimization guidelines for large sites</a> and our blog post <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/03/07/building-websites-optimized-for-all-platforms-desktop-mobile-etc.aspx">Building Websites Optimized for All Platforms</a>.</p> <p>Today, we want to remind folks that among the solutions you have to fix duplicate problems on your site, relying on canonical tag is not necessarily the perfect solution to fix all your duplicate content problems. Let me share an example of a site outputting hundreds of millions of URLs including plenty of dupes and I’ll explain what happened when the search engines started implementing canonical tags. Names will not be named, but this is a real example.</p> <p>Search engines will follow links to canonical destination URLs discovered in the canonical source URLs, but they will continue to visit canonical source URLs as the canonical destination may change and they check similarity between the content of the source and the content of the destination. By visiting canonical source pages, search engines waste the limited crawl bandwidth they generally have assigned to a website, and worse, may continue discovering inside the canonical source page plenty of URLs with extra useless URLs parameters. This extra-crawling and processing impact the overall quality of the site in our index and can create unneeded crawl loads on websites. Testing of differences between sources and destinations may impact the transfer of signals from source to destination, as well.</p> <p>So we want to tell you that at Bing, we have a better solution to fix your duplicate problems than simply relying only on the canonical tag.</p> <p>When you have duplicate problems due to extra URLs parameters, using the <strong><em>URL Normalization</em></strong> feature in the Bing Webmaster Tools is the preferred method as you are telling us which parameters can go away; we call this <strong><em>URL normalization</em></strong>. By normalizing, we mean that our crawler will not visit the URLs with extra parameters except for an occasional test of the quality of the normalization rules. You benefit through less pointless crawling which reduces resource loads on your server, fresher copy in our index of the canonical destination URLs and less out-links being discovered with extra-parameters. You can still use the canonical tag on these pages as complimentary information to the URL Normalization rules provided. Another advantage of using URL Normalization in the Bing Webmaster Tools is that you don’t need to wait for your engineering team to implement the canonical tag to fix your problem. You can implement these normalization rules right away in the tool without any code change. You can also do http 301 redirection instead of using the canonical tag when possible.</p> <p></p> <p>The solution to some major content duplicate problems you may have can be as easy as a 5 minute task: connect to Bing Webmaster Tools and suggest URL Normalization rules. To help you we provide in the tool the most common duplicate URL parameters detected on your site. You can also review what we index via the Index Explorer feature to see any other parameters you’d like us to skip when crawling.</p> <p>Thanks for your help removing duplicate content from your sites and in helping to keeping a lid on infinity.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Video killed the radio star, but we still want your videos</h1> <p>2012-04-24T22:19:00Z</p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Feeds allow Bing to easily learn about the videos on your website. The purpose is to help Bing include your video content in the Bing index, which may not have otherwise been discovered by Bing's web content crawlers. Submitting a feed provides you with a higher assurance that your videos will be included in the index in a more complete and timely manner. In addition, the feed can provide Bing with rich descriptions (i.e. metadata) about your videos that can be helpful for better understanding by users.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Bing Media feed specification is an optimized media RSS (mRSS) feed for inclusion in the Bing Video index. It specifies three types of video feeds : full back-catalog feeds (aka “full feed”), incremental update feeds (aka “incremental feed”), and expire feeds. All three have different purposes, but all share the same structure and format. The </span></span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/toolbox/media/p/Bing-Video-RSS-Reference.pdf"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bing mRSS video specification document</span></span></a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> covers optional and required tags, date/time format, and includes a complete example of a video feed. </span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bing can also support other feed or sitemap protocols. Please contact </span></span><a target="_blank" href="mailto:bingfeed@microsoft.com"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bing Content Feed Support</span></span></a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">for inquiries.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Other Feed or Sitemap formats:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Media RSS</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Media RSS supplements the enclosure element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication by handling other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="color: #0000ff;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>RSS 2.0 with media enclosures</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">RSS enclosures is an older standard that specifies how to attach multimedia content to RSS 2.0 feeds by providing the URL of a file associated with syndicated entry. This has largely supplanted by media RSS feeds<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="color: #0000ff;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Yahoo mRSS specification</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Yahoo mRSS specification is similar to Bing’s mRSS and could work on a basic level. However Bing mRSS specification adds several enhancements. For details on the yahoo mRSS see:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://video.search.yahoo.com/mrss"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="color: #0000ff;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://video.search.yahoo.com/mrss</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Google Video Sitemap</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For further information or details refer to Google webmaster<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="color: #0000ff;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Baidu Internet video open protocol. </b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is an XML based markup format used by Baidu web partners to include video content into the Baidu search index. For further information refer to Baidu Webmaster<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://video.baidu.com/videoop.html"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;"><span style="color: #0000ff;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">http://video.baidu.com/videoop.html</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; color: #595959; font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Also with sufficient advanced notice, Bing Video <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>may</em></span></strong> be able to extend support to a custom feed that conforms a well formatted XLST. Contact <a target="_blank" href="mailto:bingfeed@microsoft.com"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bing Content Feed Support</span></span></a> for additional for more information.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Implementing Markup For Paginated And Sequenced Content</h1> <p>2012-04-14T00:17:00Z</p> <p>Late last week I bumped into <strong>David Flink</strong>, one of our Lead Program Managers here at Bing and after a brief chat, he agreed to write this week's blog post detailing a view on implementing paganation solutions. He's even agreed to field questions, so feel free to post up with questions related to this blog post and David can chime in with answers.</p> <p>Traditionally, Bing has relied on a set of heuristics to determine if and how individual pages on a site are related to each other. Now, through the use of the optional rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you can provide Bing with a strong indication of the structure and scope of the sequenced content on your site. For example, think about content spanning multiple pages, such as forum threads, or time-sequenced content such as news articles and blog posts.<br /> <br />Using the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you have full control over the sequencing of your pages. Let’s examine the following example:<br /> <br /> <br />The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for an oldest-to-newest sequence<br /> <br />In this example, the webmaster has determined that his user prefer to read news articles from oldest to newest. The webmaster has reflected this order in the implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, with the rel="next" link elements pointing to a newer article on the site. Note that although it is perfectly acceptable to maintain multiple sequences on your site – for example, one sequence for news, one for politics, and one for finance – we encourage you to avoid adding more than one rel="next" and more than one rel="prev" link element to your pages.<br /> <br />Now let’s review this alternative implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for blogs:<br /> <br /> <br />The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for a newest-to-oldest sequence<br /> <br />The universally preferred order for blog posts is newest to oldest. In the example above, this order has been reflected in the implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, with the rel="next" link elements pointing to older blog posts on the site. As in the previous example, the first page in the sequence features just the rel="next" link element, while the last page in the sequence features just the rel="prev" link element. Avoid looping the sequence back to an index page on the last natural page of the sequence (using, for example, <link rel="next" href="index.aspx">), as this obscures the sequence.<br /> <br /><strong>Multi-Page Content</strong></p> <p>Once you have settled on one or more sequences, it’s important to keep multi-page content in mind. A user reading page 1 of a multi-page article will expect the next item in the sequence to be page 2, not a newer article. Review this example:<br /> <br /> <br />The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for an oldest-to-newest sequence with multi-page content<br /> <br />We strongly encourage you to prioritize sequencing for multi-paged content over all other sequences to ensure a predictable user experience.<br /> <br /><strong>Eager To Get Started?</strong></p> <p>Implementing the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements is a relatively straight-forward process. These pointers will help you successfully complete the implementation:</p> <ul> <li>Link elements should be added within the <head> section of your pages. Alternative implementations, such as the addition of rel attributes to anchor elements in the body of your pages, are currently not supported.</li> <li>Using the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you establish a relationship between at most 3 pages on your site: the current page, the page immediately preceding the current page (rel="prev") and the page immediately following the current page (rel="next"). Note that the first page in the sequence should just contain the rel="next" link element, while the last page in the sequence should contain just the rel="prev" link element.</li> <li>Avoid adding more than one rel="next" and more than one rel="prev" link element to your pages.<br />URL parameters, such as the ones includes in the example above, should be reflected in the HREF attributes of your link elements. URL parameters appended solely for tracking purposes, such as search queries and session identifiers, can also be appended. To avoid having these URL parameter surface in search results for your pages, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify a preferred URL for the content displayed. For example, the page <span style="color: #3366ff;">http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=3&Query=Bikes</span> may contain the following link elements: <ul> <li>A pointer to the preferred URL for the page content (without the URL parameter used for tracking): <link rel="canonical" href="<span style="color: #3366ff;">http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=3</span>" /></li> <li>A pointer to the next page: <link rel="next" href="<span style="color: #3366ff;">http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=4&Query=Bikes</span>" /></li> <li>A pointer to the previous page: <link rel="prev" href="<span style="background-color: #ffffff;"><span style="color: #3366ff;">http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=2&Query=Bikes</span></span>" /></li> </ul> </li> <li>You are free to exclude certain pages within the sequence (after applying the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements) from indexing using the following meta element: <ul> <li><meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p>Implementing these rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements doesn't trigger a new visual treatment for your pages on our search result pages. It does, however, allow us to more comprehensively understand and index your content. If you have any questions regarding the implementation of these link elements to your site, please feel free to add them the comments section below.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing 8 Social and SEO myths reviewed</h1> <p>2012-04-05T22:44:00Z</p> <p>Last week I participated in an #seochat. One comment that someone took exception with was the idea of how "authority" is defined. Essentially, this person took exception with the notion that to be seen as an authority, you need to maintain a healthy follower/following ratio. Specifically, they argued they knew plenty of people with equal numbers in both columns and each column in the tens of thousands, and that those individuals were, in fact, seen as authorities.</p> <p>I'm sure, in isolated cases, this could be true. Take your average celebrity, as an example. They sometimes have close to equal numbers, yet they are still an "authority". Yup, they can get away with that simply because their reach gives them an edge. They are a household name.</p> <p>What I found interesting about the discussion last week was someone suggesting to know that we, the engine, were in fact seeing this person as an authority. It's not like we send out certificates. Still, they have a valid, if limited, point. In the broader picture, though, it got me thinking about some other things folks may not understand fully. And so let's review some of the common myths around social and SEO.</p> <p><strong>Title is all I need</strong></p> <p>So many people still cling to this idea. "If I just get my title right, everyhting will be fine." To be clear, a well written, focused title tag still matters. It helps us understand your focus and so helps us trust the content of the page when the title and content match. Stack that trust over lots of pages and our love for the domain starts to go up as well. The title is a strong signal, for sure, but thinking hitting this high point and skipping the rest will help you grow is a thing of the past. Balance is needed today to see success. User experience matters, page load times, unique content, authority signals, social signals, links and more all contribute. </p> <p><strong>Meta Description will save my bacon</strong></p> <p>No. You should not look to your meta description to directly help boost your rankings. Read that last sentence carefully. While this tag may not pump up your rankings, it can help increase click rates when you appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) . Think of your meta description as your call to action that a searcher sees. Get this right and you can potentially influence click rates, which over time can help your rankings. Write your tags poorly, however, and we'll do our best to fill in the blanks, but the results may be less than opitmal. Better you get these right on your own.</p> <p><strong>Meta Keywords are the bee's knees</strong></p> <p>While meta keywords are useful, it's not for SEO. By all means, fill in your meta keywords tags if you like. Just get it right. Keyword stuffing still gets a sideways glance and may make us wonder what else you're capable of. By itself, its not a big deal, but since it's not going to help, why persue it? meta keyword tags can provide some value, though. Think about some of the services, like contextul ad programs, that may reference the data inside a meta keyword tag to help align ads with page content. Or screen assistive technologies that may reference this tag to help the visitor understand the page content. In the world of SEO, meta keyword tags are optional, so think beyond SEO and consider the bigger picture. </p> <p><strong>Social is my saviour</strong></p> <p>This is today's darling. Thinking SEO is dead and social has supplanted it is a popular notion. If you just tweet and post on the wall, you'll be golden. Let's not take anything away from social, as the signals it generates are valuable to helping the engine understand sentiment and intent. And let's not overlook the timeliness and trending signals social can generate. So yeah, valuable stuff. But playing in the social wading pool won't, by itself, secure your future. It's important to interact with your clients, visitors, fans and friends. This helps build a sense of community around your product, service or brand, and also helps cement your role as an authority. What social cannot do is replace well written content or develop well scripted title tags and so on. Social is an important part of the mix, but alone, it won't guarantee success in the SERPs.</p> <p><strong>Navigation doesn't matter, my users will figure it out</strong></p> <p>Too many websites continue to overlook the user experience (UX). Cryptically naming navigational elements, hoping visitors will figure it out "if they visit often enough". Trouble is, if the visitor thinks you're a dead end because they cannot easily find what they seek, they won't come back. This is a single example in a sea of UX items that need to be considered. From page load times to content hierarchy. From content quality to discoverability. From ease of consupmtion to page design. There are so many elements to consider, its worth engaging an expert. And don't assume your SEO consultant is automatically a UX expert. Usability as a dicsipline has been around a long time, and only in recent years has there been a push to see SEO and usability in the same scope. True, some were early adopters of this thinking, but even today, so many don't get it. Bottom line here is make sure, in all cases, you put your user first. Search crawlers come second. Be clear on that.</p> <p><strong>Links shall light the path</strong></p> <p>Yes, links are still important. No, you shouldn't buy links. Yes, you can guest blog your way to quality links. Yes, we ignore links if we think they are sketchy. So where's the mystery? It lies in the misconception that links are so important that their signals trump all others. So many SEOs still think links are the holy grail. True link building experts will tell you that getting an organic link is one of the hardest things to accomplish online these days. Gone are the days of simply asking for one from a site. Today, you need to be subversive about it all. You need to create such compelling content that people share it freely. Your social programs need to be so well focused, tested and refined that you know exactly which hooks get action from your followers. In the end, though, it all starts with quality, unique content. If you wow your visitors with your content, and prove yourself useful, they will share you with their friends. After all, everyone wants to impress their friends being the first to share the next coolest, most useful thing. If you're that thing, links shall follow.</p> <p><strong>All I need is UGC</strong></p> <p>Common thinking among too many bloggers is that getting some User Generated Content (UGC) below your post will make your page unique. This then opens up the idea that the blog post needn't be unique (enter article sharing sites) , and that you can get others to effectively create your content for you. Let's get real about this. There is very little unique about content sourced from an article sharing site, so that won't help. We can understand the difference between the content created by the website and comments added by visitors. And while an active, vibrant comunity can go along way to helping your site rank better for all kinds of reasons, its tough to grow to this level. If you want to leverage others to create content, hire a writer to create unique content for your site. You'll fare better in the log run.</p> <p><strong>Auto-followers to the rescue</strong></p> <p>Don't fall for this one folks. If you think big numbers of followers will point us in your direction, be careful. If we see you've got the same number of people that you follow, you effectively net a zero. This was touched on above, and yeah, there can be exceptions. Before you set out to become one of those exceptions, though, better do a gut check. What about your situation tells us you are an authority besides just these social signals? The recommendation here is to avoid using auto-follow services to grow your following. Do it the old fashioned way: share useful content. Your followers will appreciate it and recommend you to others.</p> <p>In most cases, these myths, and others, persist because people are constantly seeking short cuts. But they spend as much time looking for short cuts as they would if they just invested in producing quality content from the start. If you want to be seen as quality, it helps - a lot - if you actually are quality. Think back to the '70's, '80's and even earlier. Before the Internt existed for us to populate with kittehs, notes about what we ate for lunch and online commerce, business followed a standard idea: produce a business plan and follow it. A 5 year plan was often standard. </p> <p>So why, oh why, do today's online business owners not treat their online endevours in this manner? So many more would succeed if they just treated their business like a business, and stopped seeking shortcuts. Don't be sucked in by the myths. It still takes work to succeed.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing 4 things you may not know about Bing Webmaster tools and 1 about Bingbot</h1> <p>2012-03-30T22:50:00Z</p> <p><strong>Keyword research tool</strong></p> <p>Our organic keyword research tool is live and a great way to do keyword research. What makes this tool different is the data source. Instead of pulling from the paid advertising side and their attendant tools, we’ve built ours to run on organic search query volumes from Bing. You simply type in your phrase, determine if you want an exact match to the phrase by selecting “strict” and hit the <em>Search</em> button. The results for the phrase you entered, and related phrases will appear on the page. You can select a date ranging back 6 months from the current date, and export the data as well. Filters exist to narrow down the information, allowing you to target down to a country/region or language as well. There’s also a <em>History</em> section that allows easy access to your last 25 researched phrases.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>Webmaster API</strong></p> <p>Bing Webmaster now comes in a handy API form! Almost all of the data available through our tools is available via the API, so you can grab a copy and plug it into your favorite dashboard to view your data where you work most. The API access point can be found near the <em>Preferences</em> section.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>Message alert setup</strong></p> <p>You can control whether we email you alerts easily. By allowing us permission, and specifying an email address, we can send alerts on such issues as malware detection. You can choose whichever email address you like, specify the types of messages you’d like to get from us, and choose the frequency at which we email you. You can access this feature from the <em>Preferences</em> section in your account.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>Average impression as trust indicator</strong></p> <p>Inside the tools, in the Traffic section for your domain, you’ll see a list of keywords and the amount of traffic each keyword has sent you’re your site. To the right of this is a column labeled “Avg. Impression Position”. Keep an eye on this column. It’s no secret that we move your listing up and down, testing you in different locations. The key takeaway here is that as that number gets smaller, it means you’re closer to ranking at the top of the SERP. You can use this information to understand how we view your site against that query. If you see your impression position – where we show you in the SERP – increasing, you’re doing the right things. If you see it decreasing, you may want to review your work, or check to see if your competition is getting ahead of you.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>Bingbot’s alternate career</strong></p> <p>Bingbot is a budding thespian. He's a bonafide actor and was an extra in Real Steel. While he didn’t have a speaking role, he was there in the background. He's also done stunt work for KITT, of Knight Rider fame, and actually once turned down a role as C3PO, stating C3PO was "..too prissy...". He plans to write a memoir soon, to be titled, "Oh man, the stuff I've seen..."</p> <p></p> <p>…and of course, you can probably guess what time of year it is after reading #5. The list is really only 4 items, as number 5 is pure April Fools fantasy. In truth, Bingbot will not be allowed to write a memoir...</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Does Bing like SEO? You bet your ahrefs we do...</h1> <p>2012-03-23T16:33:00Z</p> <p>As with so many things in life, perspective is important. On the surface it’s easy to say Bing likes SEO. But what does this actually mean? Do we actually care whether you have clean URLs, H1 tags and properly written meta descriptions? Sure we do, but the reasons might not be what you're thinking. At the very core of its work, SEO is about improving a website. In today's ever-populated SERPs, that's important. Small things can help your website appear ahead of a competitor in the results, and with so much money online today, every advantage counts, right?</p> <p>Well, yes and no. </p> <p>Ranking well today requires so much more than just tweaking basic, on-page technical factors.</p> <p>And you can never escape the basic rule of business: that being you need a positive ROI to stay in business long term.</p> <p>As an SEO, you've been asked before "What's the return if we insert an H1 tag on that page?" And your answer usually began with "...er...", "...umm..." or some other general stammering. Savvy amongst the SEO crowd would gravitate towards an answer that started sort of like this, "Now, you see, SEO isn't about individual items, but the sum of all the parts combined..." The bottom line remained however, that in your heart of hearts you knew the actual, direct answer to the question is "The H1 tag installation alone will likely net no measurable gain." At some point you need to be honest if the work you're doing actually returns a net positive gain to the company. Does chasing that one lingering on-page element change the balance sheet at the end of the month?</p> <p><strong>So what's the point of having the H1 then?</strong></p> <p>Blame <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg">Gutenberg</a>. With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century came an almost immediate need to figure out how content on the page should be laid out. With finite space to print on, and news abounding, early newspapers understood the value of a headline. This heading was precious space, designed to capture the eye with bold, large fonts, enticing the viewer to buy the newspaper. Today's H1 tag fulfills much the same roll, albeit modified slightly. Whereas the heading on an old-timey newspaper was meant to get you to buy the paper, today's H1 tag's job is to help you quickly understand the content of the page. The sales "ask" being not money, but for your time. Both then and now, part of the heading's job was to explain the content held within. Sure, this information is helpful for us as an engine, but really, this is for the people. It helps them understand what they are about to consume and determine of the content on the page matches their needs. The H1 is more about usability than outright SEO. If you subscribe to the idea that SEO is about usability, then you're on the right track.</p> <p><strong>What about clean URLs?</strong></p> <p>Not so many years ago you'd find plenty of websites with disastrously long URL strings. Many still exist today. Our crawlers can, by in large, get through these now. Still, shorter and cleaner is better and easier to crawl, which we always appreciate. We also appreciate the "hint" that the keywords in a URL can provide to us towards relevancy of the content. An additional benefit from using clean URLs goes directly to how a visitors sees your website. With today's tabbed browsing experiences, it’s harder to read the entire <title> at the top of a browser. In many cases, the very next section either next to, or below those tabs, is the address bar, where your clean, keyword rich URL is on display. Now, if that URL holds the title it may be immediately visible to a visitor, helping to explain the content of the page. Admittedly, this is a low percentage situation, but there is still some merit. Finally, what about all those times that links get pointed at your site with the URL as the anchor text. At least with a keyword rich URL there's a chance to get some keywords into that anchor text. Again, a small win, but a win nonetheless. In truth, as long as we can get through the URL, either type of URL works fine in most cases. We're after the content on the page, don't forget, so the URL is a small thing in the big picture we're looking at.</p> <p><strong>Meta Descriptions</strong></p> <p>Think of these as your call to action that gets placed in front of a searcher. The meta description is your chance to expand on the idea or topic noted in the page title, and insert a call to action for the searcher to take. This call to action can be as overt as "click here now" or as subtle as "complete your task with our tools". The range is nearly limitless. Those roughly 160 or so characters that appear in the SERP are really a chance to sell your site to the searcher. "Dear searcher, you should visit my site, and let me explain why..."</p> <p>Failure to craft a good meta description is met with our best attempt to fill the void. Blank meta descriptions and poorly constructed ones are skipped over in favor of content we find elsewhere in an attempt to explain relevancy to the searcher in our SERPs. We may pull from content on the page, the ODP listing for the site (if there is one), etc. The point here is that you should take control of this space to help the searcher zero in on your listing in the SERP. What you shouldn't do, however, is pin your hopes on the meta description suddenly vaulting you higher in the rankings. While we can see them, and are happy to read them and take hints from them as to the relevancy of the content on the page, they aren't a silver bullet for rankings.</p> <p>What’s the point of all this you ask? Well, the bottom line is this:</p> <p>If SEO is viewed as an investment in the usability of a website, you're onto something. If, on the other hand, you feel SEO is the full monty on its own, you need a hit the reset button. We've progressed far enough today in the world of search that even poorly optimized sites can give off signals strong enough to rank well. Thanks to the integration of social signals, a niche player can jump ahead of entrenched sites to capture eyeballs through sheer force of being viral. This doesn't mean that social alone has the power to guarantee you rankings, but when unique content, a good user experience (UX) and social come together, the net result can lead to favorable rankings.</p> <p>When it comes to SEO, if your investment is centered around building a more useful, useable website, then you're on the right track. If your goal is simply to game your way to a top ranking, thinking "SEO" is a short-cut around investing in quality content or a solid UX, in the long run you'll fail. In fact, today it might make sense for us to move past calling the work search engine optimization. Maybe "content optimization" or "experience optimization" may better capture the nature of the work performed. Today, tweaking those few on-page elements that still are useful signals to a search engine is only one very small slice of the pie. Factoring in social, content creation and user experience alone easily vaults the work past the status of simply "SEO".</p> <p>And in the end, if you're still focused on "what the search engine wants", you're at the wrong party. The cool kids long ago moved past this type of thinking. Today's environment demands you think of the big picture at all times, and you might even say that basic SEO work has been relegated to the "tactic" pile. Still worth doing, but more muscle-memory than "deep-thought" type work. Today your focus needs to extend to social interactions, click rates, user satisfaction, the trace of actions groups of users leave when interacting with you in the SERPs and so much more.</p> <p>Yes, Bing likes SEO. Trouble is, it might not be SEO as you think of it. This depends on who you're focused on. The engine, or the searcher. Bing very clearly focuses on the searcher. Maybe you should to?</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Reviewing social search and search quality insights</h1> <p>2012-03-16T00:15:47Z</p> <p>The last couple of weeks have been busy here at Bing. For those who may have missed these great reading opportunities, I wanted to take a minute to call out two items worth spending some time with.</p> <p>First up, the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.stonetemple.com/author-authority-and-social-media-with-bings-paul-yiu/">interview</a> Eric Enge over at Stone Temple Consulting did with Paul Yiu, our Group Program Manager for Social Search. They covered a wide range of items such as:</p> <ul> <li>Authority - "They also look at the number of people you follow. If you follow 200 people and 8,000 follow you this might indicate more authority than if you follow 9,000 people and 8,000 follow you."</li> <li>Trustworthiness - "Relevance of the followers is used as a signal: “who you are connected to says something about you. You don’t want to get into the wrong crowd; It’s not good if you hang out with the bad group at high school.”"</li> <li>Relevancy - "You don’t hurt your Twitter stream by talking about irrelevant stuff. What matters more is what happens to your relevant stuff."</li> <li>Relevancy, again - "The relevance of the re-tweeters matters too."</li> <li>Proof of Usefulness - "“If the content doesn’t earn its spot its placement gets modified” (confirming again that Bing uses CTR which was done for the first time in this <a target="_blank" href="http://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-and-bing-webmaster-tools-with-duane-forrester/">interview with Duane Forrester</a>.)"</li> </ul> <p>Eric called out roughly another 15 or so items in his own summary, and I'll let folks head over via the link above to read the whole interview. Paul shared a lot of useful stuff, so its worth the jump to get a peak at some of the important, current signals in use and some of the thinking behind them.</p> <p>The week prior, Harry Shum, our Corporate VP for Bing R&D started a new series for our search Blog called <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/03/05/introducing-bing-search-quality-insights.aspx">Search Quality Insights</a>. Designed to help folks understand a bit better why search ticks the way it often does.</p> <p>This series will prove eye opening for many in the industry if they follow along. In Harry's own words, <em>"[we] aimed at giving you deeper insight into the algorithms, trends and people behind Bing. This blog is the first in a series that will take you behind the search box for an up close view into the core of the Bing search engine."</em> If you're an SEO on ANY level, that has got to get you excited!</p> <p>The first article in this series is from Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Bing. It kicks off the discussion with an overview of how we’re tackling the topic of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/03/05/bing-search-quality-insights-whole-page-relevance.aspx"><span style="color: #0044cc;">whole page relevance</span></a> at Bing. Jan delves into how we go beyond the traditional concept of page rank to deliver rich “answers” like video, images and maps that are relevant and help you get more done. This view helps explain how we craft SERPs. Understanding how we utilize the actions of searchers in various ways can give an SEO clues as to how to approach their efforts in building better content, optimizing for video, images, etc.</p> <p>Tons of learning over the last week or so. I encourage folks to hit the links above and get schooled in the finer details of social and search.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Building Websites Optimized for All Platforms (desktop, mobile, etc.)</h1> <p>2012-03-08T00:23:00Z</p> <p>Today the Web is accessible almost everywhere. Our PC, laptops, tablets, smartphones and more allow us to access content anywhere, anytime. This also means there is a need to show content in many ways, optimized to different environments. A common SEO question we receive is how to optimize websites for various platforms such as desktop, mobile phone, tablet, etc. </p> <p>At Bing, we want to keep things simple by proposing the “one URL per content item” strategy. For each website, instead of having different URLs per platform (one URL for desktop, another for mobile devices, etc.), our feedback is that producing fewer variations of URLs will benefit you by avoiding sub-optimal and underperforming results. It can help manage unwanted bandwidth usage as well.</p> <p>There could even be a compelling monetary case made here for some businesses. To build, maintain and continually update a second site, such as a mobile version of your normal website, often entails some cost. Depending on the depth and frequency of work, that cost can add up each year.</p> <p>By outputting only one URL for the same content, you will have the following benefits:</p> <ol> <li>You have more ranking signals coming to this URL. Example: the vast majority of mobile URLs do not have inbound links from other websites as people do not link to mobiles URLs like they link to regular web-situated URLs.</li> <li>This is also less search engine crawler traffic coming to your web servers, which is especially useful for large websites. Fewer URLs to crawl reduces the bandwidth our crawlers consume.</li> <li>Less work (and potentially less cost) building, updating and maintaining a stand-alone mobile-focused website.</li> </ol> <p>Now that you have a single URL for each piece of your content, how do you optimize your website for different platforms?</p> <ol> <li>By performing client browser detection (user agent, customer preferences, etc.), you can still optimize the display for the device your customers are using. This topic is presented in detail in the document <a target="_blank" href="http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9713253">Designing Web Sites for Phone Browsers</a>; please note that this document does touch briefly on the subject of redirection to alternate URLs for mobile content, which is not the approach we recommend for best SEO results.</li> <li>Also keep in mind our guidance on cloaking. Bing recommends you <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2007/12/04/live-search-and-cloaking-detection.aspx">avoid cloaking</a> </li> </ol> <p><strong>Can I still optimize display for mobile clients? Is it the end of m.domain.com style URLs?</strong></p> <p><em>We do not recommend you change everything right away. We are recommending that you think twice in your future strategies and figure out if the “one URL per content item” strategy can improve your SEO.</em> Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices), which you can opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools) or not. Our real concern is the hundreds of millions of additional URLs that are created on mobile-only domains, which for most of them will never accrue any value and rarely, if ever, rank in any form of search, yet still consume resources on both your servers and ours. </p> <p>As noted, it may make sense to keep select URLs for specific instances, but you still need to manage these URLs. By placing all of your URLs online and making them accessible, you encourage the search engine to index all of that extra content and wade through the information to try to understand what has value and what does not. If everyone links to your HTML webpage online, we’ll see that version as holding more value than a URL specific to a mobile device, which actually won’t even have enough link signals to tell us of its value. In the end, the lack of signals is itself a signal to us, and not a positive one.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Webmaster Tools announces new features</h1> <p>2012-02-27T22:43:00Z</p> <p>We're at SMX West this week, just in time to announce a couple of new tools/features for webmasters around the world.</p> <p>Remember all those Birds-of-a-feather lunch chats last year? Those tweets you sent me? The surveys we sent out? Well, we've been busy with that feedback working on tools to help you. Today we're announcing our organic keyword research tool and access to your webmaster tools data via an API.</p> <p><strong>Webmasters have a new choice to perform keyword research</strong></p> <p><strong>Keyword research tool</strong> – this tool allows you to perform keyword research on any phrase you enter. It resides within your WMT account and offers the ability to see query volume data on the phrase you enter, and related phrases, across many different countries and languages. You can easily explore query volumes on keywords by simply clicking on any related keyword. All data within the tool is exportable, and we hold a history of up to 6 months for all phrases. This means you can select a date range covering up to the previous six months to see query volume data for the time period you select. Query data shown in the results within this tool are based on organic query data from Bing and is raw data, not rounded in any way. This tool is found when you login, on the <em>Keyword</em> tab.</p> <p>Upon login, you see a simple interface with a few options to help you target country and langauge. You can also select "strict" to ensure results are restricted to the exact phrase to word you entered.</p> <p></p> <p>Entering a phrase or keyword and clicking the <em>Search</em> button will bring back organic keyword query data for the phrase entered, as well as for related phrases. Here we have selected one filter for the United States, but left the language open, and strict unchecked to see what the keyword ecosystem looks like around our topic, in the US. Not surprisingly, our example of <em>fly fishing</em>, during these winter months, nets us lower query volumes. The graph clearly shows a run-up on query volume coming into the holiday season, and trending lower afterwards. </p> <p></p> <p>adCenter CPC data is shown to help you understand associated costs if you choose to buy paid ads on the phrase. Hover over any phrase to see more data appear in a box to the left of the list. We also provide a small graph which details the query trend for the previous 6 months. This graph gives you an idea, at a glance, of query volume fluctuations.</p> <p></p> <p>Clicking on any phrase in the list pivots the data around that phrase, and keywords related to that phrase. Clicking on <em>Impressions </em>above the suggested phrases re-sorts the list on impression count, from lowest to highest, or highest to lowest.</p> <p>You also have the ability to select a date range (top, right corner near the country/language filters). We keep a 6 months running history in this current version of the tool, so select any range within the past 6 months, hit search and see the data you wanted.</p> <p>One final feature is the <em>History</em> function. This keeps track of your last 25 queries. Clicking the <em>History</em> link gets you a popup window. Simply click on any of the past phrases shown in the list to have the system rerun the report on that phrase, saving you re-entering the data again and making it easy to flip between queries to double check data.</p> <p></p> <p></p> <p>The data we're showing has a planned maximum latency of two weeks. This means that you may see data not appearing if you narrow the window to anything up to the past two current weeks. This latency depends on when you perform the search in relation to when we update the data store. Worst case, we'll be able to show you data that's as recent as 2 weeks ago. Best case, if the timing is right, you'll see data current to within just a few days if your work aligns with our data updates. Sorry gang, but we won't be able to communicate exactly when each data update with happen, and that 2 week window is not carved in stone. While we refresh the data each two weeks, depending on how much data we need to crunch, it could take a day or two for the fresh data to hit the tool for you to see. </p> <p>An alternate path into the keyword tool can be found <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords">here</a>. No matter the path you take to the tool, you'll need to login to your webmaster account aong the way, so have your login handy.</p> <p><strong>Can I get that data to go, please?</strong></p> <p><strong>Bing Webmaster Tools API</strong> – this feature allows you to easily use your Bing WMT data in other locations. If data is available inside the Bing Webmaster Tools, it’s currently available via the API as well. The main exceptions to this is our messaging and the keyword research data. You will need to either login to your account to use the keyword research tool presently, or set up email alerts to see any messages we post to your account.</p> <p>To access your Bing Webmaster Tools API, head to the main page when you login. Immediately below the <em>Preferences</em> option in the left hand navigation, you'll see the option to access the API.</p> <p></p> <p>The page you land on explains the process for getting the data authorized and flowing. Now you can interact with your data in our tools whever you choose. As noted, if its available to you in the tools today, its accessable via the API, the exceptions being access to the keyword research tool data and messaging. Need a fix of geek-speak to understand exactly what the API is able to provide? Head <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/webmaster/documentation/api/index.html">here</a> to read the support documentation for the webmaster API.</p> <p></p> <p>These features are available now, to anyone with a webmaster tools account.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Managing Bingbot - crawl control in your hands</h1> <p>2012-02-25T00:41:02Z</p> <p>I don't mean "in your hands" as in on your smartphone, as an app, etc. "In your hands" here means under your control. Putting the power with the people, though I admit that an app would be super cool for this feature. Hmmm.....</p> <p>What we've covering in this video is how to control Bingbot through Webmaster Tools. Well, less about the actual how (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/06/08/updates-to-bing-webmaster-tools-data-and-content.aspx">find that here</a>) and a bit more about the "why you want to".</p> <div id="Player1Container"></div> <p> <script src="http://img.widgets.video.s-msn.com/js/embed.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> </p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Submitting your content directly to Bing</h1> <p>2012-02-17T20:35:00Z</p> <div id="Player1Container"></div> <p> <script src="http://img.widgets.video.s-msn.com/js/embed.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> </p> <p>Four easy ways to make sure your content gets in, or back in, to the Bing index.</p> <ol> <li>URL/Domain submit - <a target="_blank" href="https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx">submit your domain</a> to us if you have a new website.</li> <li><strong>Submit URL</strong> feature inside Bing Webmaster Tools, under the <em>Index</em> tab<br /><br /></li> <li><a target="_blank" href="https://support.discoverbing.com/default.aspx?productkey=bingwebmaster&locale=en-US&st=1&wfxredirect=1">Reinclusion request support</a> via out email support form</li> <li>RSS feed submission via our <strong>Sitemap Submit</strong> feature under the<em> Crawl</em> tab inside Bing WMT<br /><br /></li> </ol><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Bing Becoming an authority - how to and why you want to</h1> <p>2012-02-10T22:00:00Z</p> <p>Back in October we posted <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/28/want-to-be-an-authority-here-s-how.aspx">this idea</a> and got great feedback from folks. Today we're posting a quick review video on the topic. It's 3 minutes from your day that we hope will help get you pointed on the right path to becoming a true authority and reaping the benefits.</p> <div id="Player1Container"></div> <p> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://img.widgets.video.s-msn.com/js/embed.js" language="javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> </p> <p> </p><div style="clear:both;"></div> </article> </main></body></html>