SEO

Bing Webmaster Guidelines are now revised.

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Bing webmaster is a free SEO tool available in the digital market. The tool is a great fit for SEOs and Webmasters for submitting their websites to get traffic and visibility on it. If you are a part of digital marketing then you should know that Bing webmaster index and crawl your site so that you can see your site’s performance on Bing. What you can see here are clicks, impressions, bounce rate, visibility and traffic coming to your site and a lot more. Furthermore, the tool also offers webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their websites, submitting new URL, Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, website statistics, content submission, etc.

All these things are actually written in Bing webmaster guidelines. But recently Bing has updated its guidelines for users. What could be the new guidelines? What would Bing have changed? These questions might be hovering in your head if you use the Bing webmaster tool.

So let’s start and dive in the guidelines of Bing webmaster tool below.

Recently updated guidelines of Bing webmaster tool

Bing released the updated Bing Webmaster guidelines. Let me also tell you that the guidelines Bing updated now was working on it since last year. The old version was from the original 2012 version. Now Bing has completely changed it into a new version by introducing some new guidelines in it.

How did people get to know about the updated guidelines? Christi Olson, the Head of Evangelism at Bing, said on Twitter “We sought to modernize the guidelines to provide more clarity and easy to understand insights on how Bing discovers indexes and ranks content.”

The new guidelines will help you understand how Bing finds, indexes and ranks a website. This will be now easy for you to check the performance of your website on Bing Webmaster. So let’s go further to know the guidelines.

New guidelines are divided into 4 categories

I will talk about all the categories one by one.

#1. How Bing finds and indexes your site

Sitemap – This is the first way Bing uses to discover your site URLs and content on your website. The sitemap actually tells the crawler which pages and files are important on your site. It also provides additional information when the page last updated, etc. You should also use the XML site to help Bing discover all the relevant URLs and content on your site. Moreover, Bing supports sitemap format using XML, RSS, mRSS, Atom 1.0 and a simple text file.

Bing URL or Content Submission API – Try to use this because it will help you instantly index your updated website content on Bing. If you can’t use API then make sure to use updated URLs directly through Bing Webmaster Tools.

Avoid using duplicate content – You have to limit the number of pages on your site. Reduce the number of duplicate content. Avoid mobile-friendly specific URLs. Just try to use the same URL for desktop and mobile.

Robot.txt – A robot.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URL page of your site is to crawl or not. They usually instruct and manage crawler traffic. Bing says you should use the noindex robots Meta tag instead of disallowing it in the robot.txt.

Let Bing crawl more – This feature allows you to manage how Bingbot crawls your content

Javascript – Bing is now able to process Javascript. However, it minimizes the number of HTTP requests. Bing now recommends Dynamic rendering to switch between client site rendered and pre-rendered content for specific user agents like Bingbot for large websites.

#2. Help Bing understand your pages

  • For content, Bing says that every website should include highly relevant content. And it should not include affiliate links that make people visit another website. Bing says your content should be easy to navigate, rich and engaging for the visitors.
  • Bing says your content should be for searchers and not for search engines. Add specific keywords that users are looking for information.
  • Your content should be unique, don’t copy it from other sources.
  • Add unique and relevant images and videos in your content. Bing is able to extract information from images, videos, captions, structured data, titles, like a transcript.
  • Your content should be easily navigable for all site users. Test the usability of devices like a screen reader, checking the accurate images and videos, etc. Testing usability will help identify issues and problems with navigation, reading, order, table markup, and form elements within your website.
  • For HTLM, Bing says that your HTML elements and alt attributes must be descriptive, specific, and accurate on your website.
  • For Microsoft Edge Browser, Bing says to make sure your web page doesn’t appear broken in it. Your content must be visible when searching.
  • Bing says let crawlers in your robot.txt crawl all your CSS style sheet and Javascript files.

#3. How Bing ranks your content

Here are many guidelines which Bing uses to rank your content. These include-

  • First is quality and relevancy, your content must have a quality such as a site’s reputation, transparency of authorship, etc. Bing highly detects content using derogatory language.
  • According to Bing, every content should be interactive enough to engage users. Bing has some questions for checking user engagement- did the user click through to search results for a given query, and if so, which results? Did the users adjust or reformulate their queries?
  • The page load time also plays a great role in ranking your content. Bing says slower loading will make visitors leave your site and this is a poor experience for Bing. Faster page loads are always better. Therefore improve your page speed.
  • Bing always tries to prefer content that is fresh and unique. It means the page should provide up-to-date information.
  • The location of your page or content also matters when it comes to ranking. Bing checks where the page is hosted, the language of a document, or the location of other visitors to the page.

#4. Abuse and Examples of things to avoid

Here Bing can take action against your site if the site is of low-quality, containing inappropriate, manipulative, or misleading behavior. Below are some of the examples of misleading sites-

  • Avoid using duplicate links as it will lead Bing to lose trust in you. You can use the rel=canonical element to solve this problem. Bing encourages using the Ignore URL Parameters Tools.
  • Bing says while creating content don’t participate in phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other badware by verifying your content. Try to keep your operating system up to date, maintain a content management system, etc.
  • Your site should not have irrelevant markup on the page because it can be inaccurate or misleading for users.
  • Pay attention to keywords also. Don’t make a mistake of doing keyword stuffing otherwise, Bing will penalize your content. Use relevant and limited keywords as required.
  • Don’t try to add scraping or copying content from other reputable sites to your own. It will not add any value to your site. Basically, you’re infringing on the copyright. Therefore, try to create your own content that differentiates your site from others.

The bottom line

Guys, I hope the article was enough informative for you to understand the new guidelines of the Bing webmaster tool. If you use the Bing webmaster tool to check the performance of your site then you should abide by all the new rules of Bing. I also suggest you do so otherwise Bing will penalize your site. It will only help you get a better rank of your site on Bing.

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By Monika Gola