The Big Reveal: Bing Webmaster Guidelines
-
David
-
November 19th, 2012
Finally, webmasters near and far can learn more about the inner workings of Bing via the Bing Webmaster Guidelines!
Although nowhere near as detailed or comprehensive as Google's Webmaster Guidelines, they do provide greatly valued insight into the search engine.
Really, the entirety of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines can be gleaned in a few mere minutes, but it is broken up regarding these following topics:
Content
Bing rewards authoritative, unique content, and penalizes duplicated, weak content. Great content is at the heart of high conversions, strong social media efforts, and an otherwise busy site. As with other search engines, focus on having sites users love to be on.
Links
Like Google, Bing has developed algorithms to identify websites that sell links, so do be aware of that.
Social
Although the guidelines provide no specific information regarding social media, they do say:
Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence. If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
Indexation
Bing Webmaster Guidelines recommends you take advantage of Webmaster Tools, especially to submit URLs and sitemaps.
Technical
In addition to monitoring page load time, Bing also recommends you keep an eye on rich media, sitemaps, robots.txt, and redirects. Nothing too unusual here.
SEO
This is the most comprehensive and detailed segment of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines, and emphasizes clean coding, minimal rich media, and accurate keywords.
What to Avoid
There's nothing too surprising here. As with other major search engines, there are a few basic things to avoid. Of course, these include cloaking, meta refresh redirects, duplicate content, and a variety of other schemes used to direct readers elsewhere.
Why are the Bing Webmaster Guidelines so short?
As noted on Bing's Webmaster Center blog,
They are not exhaustive and you should not expect to find deep, technical answers in them. They are intended to help most business owners understand the broad strokes of search marketing.
Despite the intentional brevity behind the Bing Webmaster Guidelines, Bing has scheduled a series of 6 free webinars that cover a range of topics including:
SEO 101
Authority Building
Search/Social Overlap
In addition to these resources, webmasters can also access Webmaster Tools and the Webmaster Center blog for more thorough, detailed explanations.
These updates are a great way for Bing to bring new blood to the program. In addition to the enormous Bing Vs. Google advertising efforts, this is one further step towards increasing notoriety and pulling some of the attention away from Google. Will this work? Only time will tell. For the meantime, we know more about what they look for!