Bing Publishes Webmaster Guidelines

[engine]

Bing has published a set of webmaster guidelines.

"These guidelines cover a broad range of topics and are intended to help your content be found and indexed within Bing."

So now you know!

Bing Publishes Webmaster Guidelines [bing.com]

[lucy24]

Can't wait to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and see how much of it flatly contradicts advice from that other search engine :)

[ergophobe]

I just skimmed it, but it looks like pretty basic advice. There might be something that will jump out with the fine-toothed comb, but it's so basic and general that I really doubt there's much in there that would surprise anyone here.

[whatson]

It does mention that the content should be decided from keyword research, where as Google say you should create content useful for your visitor, irrelevant of search volume.

[diberry]

It feels very Google '06 to me. ;)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Can't wait to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and see how much of it flatly contradicts advice from that other search engine :)

What other search engine? :)

It's about time, hopefully it's not 100% basic stuff and has some useful tidbits in it. I glanced over it and didn't see anything to suggest doing anything differently, yet.

[lucy24]

It does mention that the content should be decided from keyword research

Is that their oblique way of telling us that they have no plans to obfuscate search terms?

Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results.

If that means I gotta move up to a paid LinkedIn membership, forget it.

:: digression here to wonder uneasily what kind of snooping led them to offer to translate the page into Norwegian ::

:: further digression to wonder why they claim I have no, zero, zip 400-class problems when they're walking off with fistfuls of 410s every day, long after the G people have stopped checking ::

After much searching-- including a whole blog article devoted to Lost In Space (really)-- I learned that bing claims to honor the "crawl-delay" directive. Well, that's nice. At least they don't in-your-face Directive Ignored it.

Bing prefers you use a 301 permanent redirect when moving content, should the move be permanent. If the move is temporary, then a 302 temporary redirect will work fine. Do not use the rel=canonical tag in place of a proper redirect.

Huh?

Two discreet URLs then exist, yet both have identical content. By implementing a rel=canonical, you can tell us the original one, giving us a hint as to where we should place our trust. Do not use this element in place of a proper redirect when moving content.

Huh? again.

They mean "discrete" but last time I reported a typo, they flew into such a tizzy it took about eight e-mails to convince them I wasn't trying to report a problem with my own site :(

cross link liberally inside your site between relevant, related content

Ooh, there we go. I knew I'd find a conversation-starter if I just looked hard enough. Now all we have to do is agree on definitions of 'liberally', 'relevant' and 'related'.

URL structure and keyword usage - keep it clean and keyword rich when possible

Hey, no problem, so long as you too count "it's" as a keyword. (Or at least used to, until I started putting the Paston Letters online. Weird spellings and obscure names have now dislodged just about everything else. "Be this web page downloadyd in hast" is still a good policy, though.) I hope "keep it clean ... when possible" means I am allowed to use whatever language I deem appropriate when I accidentally overwrite a 30,000 word page about the legislative structure of Tierra del Fuego with a 300-word page about hamsters.

don’t bury links in Javascript/flash/Silverlight

I think they say that three times. No worries: I don't even know what Silverlight is. And the less said about Flash, the better.

The robots.txt file must be saved in a standard text file format, such as ASCII or UTF-8, so it can be read by the bots. One easy way to verify that the proper file format is used is to edit the file in Microsoft Notepad. Save the file using the Notepad default file format type, Text Documents (*.txt) with ANSI encoding.

AAACK! Oh, where to begin? Here I thought it was only my ebooks forum that couldn't get a grip on the difference between format and encoding.

[chrisv1963]

They forgot to add "do not hotlink other people's images. We do not tolerate content theft and bandwidth theft." Oh yes, I think I understand why. They are hotlinking our images in Bing Image Search and using our bandwidth to make their search engine "better".

[Bewenched]

@chrisv1963, No kidding about the hotlinking our images.
maybe I should have our server hot swap an image in there that says "Hey, if you want to see our pictures visit our site!" Sorry, bit off topic.

@lucy24 "a 300-word page about hamsters" You crack me up! It tried to translate the page to Spanish for me... lol.

content should be decided from keyword research

Then maybe they should start actually using the keyword meta tags.... I'm not about to write up a bunch of keyword overstuffed product pages.... give the customer all the information once.... and if it's really important like "this item bursts into flames at dawn" then maybe state it twice.

Regarding the keyword richness... at least Bing is honest about it, where Google says don't keyword stuff, yet pages appearing high over there are more stuffed than my holiday turkey.

[Hollywood]

HAHAHA ---> "They forgot to add "do not hotlink other people's images. We do not tolerate content theft and bandwidth theft." Oh yes, I think I understand why. They are hotlinking our images in Bing Image Search and using our bandwidth to make their search engine "better". "

[ergophobe]

They mean "discrete"

Maybe not. Maybe they have different rules for discreet and flagrant URLs ;-)

[TheMadScientist]

Silly me ... I thought this might be a serious thread and not just another 'poke fun at the wording and things I don't understand' bunch of nonsense.

It's so annoying to read how people who cannot comprehend why search engines do things the way they do (including wording of guidelines) and why they have to do it that way criticize absolutely everything about search engines... Try writing one sometime if you think the things they do are so simple and the way they word things isn't necessary or the way they go about things is wrong... Really, show us all, including them, how it should be done... You'd probably have way more respect for them and what they do if you ever tried to do it yourself, or even seriously thought about how, especially when you try to answer questions like: 'How do I keep people from gaming my system so I show a majority of my visitors what they want to see rather than what webmasters try to put in front of people any way they can?'

The people picking apart the wording do understand search engines use heuristics, not algorithms, so ambiguity is necessary to actually give correct advice, right? IOW: They use 'fuzzy logic' so not everything applies in all situations or even the same way in every situation where it does apply, which means if they said, 'Do exactly [blah]', not only would that open them up to being gamed in some situations, it would not be correct in other situations, because things do not always apply exactly the same way in each and every situation due to the nature of the logic they use to produce their results...

[SEOPTI]

@TheMadScientist:

I don't have respect for something called search engine or people running them, I have respect for poor people, people in need, but not for engines with tons of cash to burn.

The guidelines are fine for me, Bing has provided consistent excellent converting traffic throughout the years.