The Bing blogs and forums team are grateful for the growing participation and readership of our user community. We've worked hard over the past year to provide compelling content that will help our users get the most out of the Bing experience. We sincerely hope that our readers and participants continue to find value in the content we produce!
The reader comments left in the Bing blogs and forums have always been governed by our published Code of Conduct policies. Over the past year, we have implemented additional, clarifying policies to help minimize the incidence of irrelevant comment spam in the Bing blog and forums without affecting the ability of our community to contribute to the ongoing conversations. While those policy updates have helped reduce the amount of spam from past levels, we've received enough feedback and requests to persuade us that we need to do a bit more. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate our existing policies on comment spam and introduce some policy updates that we hope will further improve the experience and value our community derives from perusing the user comments we receive.
Starting on May 24th, 2010, the Bing community blogs and forums will observe the following policies on comments:
Our goal is to improve the value of the community by improving the value of the content it contains. We look to minimize the disruption that comment spam introduces into the community. We want to encourage everyone to participate in the Bing community! The things we do not want (and neither do our readers) are unwanted sales pitches, off-topic comments, inappropriate language, or irrelevant backlinks that cloud the environment for this growing community of users.
Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to reading even more of your comments in the Bing community!
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Editor’s note: Wezley, one of the commentors below, asked for some clarifications that I wanted to capture here. Since the big problem with comment spam is with gratuitous and irrelevant backlinks (especially in signatures), follow Wezley's lead by putting your backlinks in your Bing community profile page and leaving them out of your comments. Since your Bing community name is linked to your community profile, any visitor to the blog can visit your profile to find and follow your backlinks (where rel="nofollow" is not used, unlike here in the blog comments). It's a win-win idea for everyone! Thanks, Wezley! –Rick
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In Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web (such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit!), you're ready to start looking at what might be preventing you from ranking where you should be. In this post, we'll look at several possible, on-page issues.
Focus your aim on targeted keywords
Since search engines rank sites based in large part on their relevance to the keywords used in the search query, identifying your site's targeted keywords for each page of content is key for assessing how well they are performing with them.
It’s brainstorming time. If you don't already have any keyword and key phrase lists (really?), develop one for each content page stat. If you already have such lists, challenge your existing assumptions to see if those words and phrases on your lists are still the best keywords for your site. For more information on creating your keyword list, check out our blog post The key to picking the right keywords (SEM 101).
There are many useful keyword research tools available on the Internet (some for free, some not), to help you create and update these important lists. I suggest you consider adding the free keyword development and analysis tool from Microsoft adCenter called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to your website toolbox.
As you develop your site's keyword lists, consider whether it might be fruitful to make a run for the less competitive keywords found in the long tail of search rather than the highly competitive few keywords in your industry that are obvious to everyone (including your competitors). I discuss this concept in detail in the blog article Chasing the long tail with keyword research (SEM 101) (that post also discusses how to use the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool).
Once you have your keyword lists developed, test your assumptions. Open up several browser windows and go to the search engines your users will use (we suggest Bing for starters! 
. Run queries on those keywords and see where your site falls in the results. Try different combinations of keywords. Each page of your site should use a few of the keywords from your lists, and every keyword in your collection should be used on at least one page (just avoid using every word on every page!). As part of this review process, look to identify unproductive pages or missed keywords.
In your query tests, note how each keyword affects where your site places in the rankings of each search engine. Are you at the top of the list? Are you on the first page of 10 results? If you're not where you want to be, by identifying this problem, you're now on the right track to fixing it.
Site review task: Develop lists of targeted keywords for each page of your site and check your pre-optimization performance for those words. Consider targeting some of the less-often used words in the long tail of search.
Content is coin of the realm
We’ve said it before, and yes, we're saying it again. You need compelling, original content to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). And not just any content, but indexable content. It can't be tied up in scripts or multimedia technologies that the search bots can't read. Feed your favorite bot!
Look for opportunities to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Can you write? Develop articles about your experience. Give lists of recommendations (who doesn't love a relevant Top 10 list?). Are you a photographer? Post you own beautiful images! Are you an artist? Upload samples of your artwork. And don't stop with just yourself – let user-generated content (UGC), found in forums and blogs, help provide useful information to your readers and help drive valuable inbound links to your site, which in turn will contribute to improved site ranking. It becomes a virtuous circle. And that's a good thing.
One key point: Remember those keywords we just spoke of earlier? Those words need to be used in the text of your pages. If you're posting non-text-based, multimedia content, be sure to add keyword-rich meta data to describe it. Searchers will never know what content is on your site if you don't have a reference to it in text form, be it in , , or alt text. For more information on developing the content on your site, see our blog post Are you content with your content? (SEM 101).
The key to developing your content successfully is to target human readers. Rich, informative content written for people is what the search bot looks for and values the most. However, specifically targeting search bots in an effort to artificially improve ranking will likely result in the site being deemed web spam. This can result in penalties that can range from lower placements in the SERPs to outright expulsion from the index. For more information on what sort of content is considered web spam, see our blog articles Eggs, bacon, spam, spam, and spam (SEM 101) and The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam (SEM 101).
Site review task: Check the content on your pages to be sure you use the targeted keywords in the body text. Look for ways to add more original content to your site, including UGC-based pages.
Provide graceful degradation for media content
What if you want to wow those human readers with super-cool animations and videos or help them with beautiful, web-based applications using rich Internet application (RIA) technology like Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash? You can certainly do that, but always remember those folks who cannot keep up. You don't want to leave them high and dry if they cannot, for whatever reason, access Silverlight or Flash content. (This caveat applies to AJAX and JavaScript technologies as well.)
Why should you care about those down-level users? Because search bots are some of the users who cannot reliably access content using these technologies! And if they can't see your super-cool content, what's left for them to see? If the answer is "nothing," that's what will be indexed on your site. And that's probably not what you intended.
Here’s a test: run a web browser with the following conditions:
- Disable automatic loading of images
- Disable JavaScript
- Uninstall Silverlight
- Uninstall Flash
Essentially, make your browser a text-only experience. (Alternatively, use a tool such as SEO-Browser to run this test.) Now visit your website. What do you see? Anything? If not, you have some additional content development work to do. What you need to do is add keyword-rich, text content that is presented as a secondary alternative when the primary, super-cool stuff can't be seen. I covered this concept in depth in the blog post Illuminating the path to SEO for Silverlight.
Site review task: Check your pages employing advanced content presentations to be sure you provide alternative, useful, keyword-rich, text-based (indexable), down-level content.
Heads up on tag content
An important area to examine on every page of your site during your site review is the meta content of the tag, found at the beginning of every HTML page. The tag of every page on your site should always include and description tags.
The content of each tag should be unique and directly relevant to the content on the page. Same for the description tag. And while you're checking, look to see if these tags use some of the targeted keywords for their respective pages (if not, fix that). Bots use the content in these tags to help define the contextual theme of the pages, and thus by definition, the words and phrases used in these tags to describe the pages are identified as keywords for assessing relevance to those pages. If you use generic, boilerplate text (or even no text at all) in these pivotal tags, you are missing a fundamental opportunity to tell the bot what your page is all about.
Not only is the content within these tags considered crucial by bots, they provide significant value to human readers as well. When your site is listed in the SERPs, users will often see the content used in these tags shown in the blue line hyperlink and in the snippet text describing what content your page has to offer. If you've overlooked providing compelling and informative descriptions here, no one will ever know about the cool content you have on your site, and thus no one will click the SERP link to visit your site. What a wasted opportunity! Check out a past blog post on this subject at Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101).
I have some key tips to remember when writing and description tags:
- Use your page's targeted keywords in these tags, but always write the text so it's logically readable by a person.
- At least for search bots, word order matters. Use your most important keywords first.
- Omit the obvious, generic stuff, especially from the beginning of the tags. Instead, write a concise, pertinent description of the content on the page.
- Never stuff these tags as a keyword dump.
Site review task: Check the and description tags of each page to be sure they have unique and targeted keyword content in them.
Using your head(er tags)
Another helpful page element to consider for keyword usage is the header tag used within your content – specifically the
tag. You should have not zero, not two or more, but just one
tag in each content page. The text in that tag should ostensibly serve as the top-of-the-visible-page title (not to be confused with the tag in the page code) declaring the theme of your page's content. Given the tag's prominence in defining the theme of the page for human readers, its text content has SEO value, so use your targeted keywords here as well. You can also use additional, lower-level header tags, such as
and so on, but these tags are less significant in terms of SEO value.
Site review task: Check your content pages to be sure you are using one
tag in the text and that it uses keywords targeted for that page.
nchors away
Just as the
tag helps define the theme of a page to the bot, anchor text helps define the theme of a linked page. When you are cross-linking to other pages on your site, don't waste an opportunity to associate a keyword or two with an entire page! Use keyword-rich descriptive text in your link. Never use meaningless text such as "click here" for anchor text, which conveys nothing about the content of the referenced page.
Site review task: Check your pages to be sure you provide descriptive, keyword-rich text in your anchor (link) text, especially when cross-linking to other pages on your own site.
![]()
is everything (if you include alt text)
Do you include images in your page content? Do you use images to convey important text-based content that you want your visitors to read? (We often see vitally important text information, such as the company name or the business address) offered only within images!) If so, that content may be missed by search bots. They cannot read image content the way we can. To help bots understand what is being shown, always use alt attributes in your ![]()
tags. Using alt attributes enables you to associate your targeted keywords with the content images on your page.
I have a few tips on using images:
- Don’t bother to add alt attribute text to non-content images, such as those that fill space or simply convey color.
- Use descriptive file names (such as corvette.jpg rather than the generic and meaningless image001.jpg) to further convey meaning about the image for the search bot.
- Use the lowest image resolution needed to minimize file size. The goal is to strike a balance between reasonable image quality and page load time.
- For pages that require high-resolution images (especially in large numbers), use linked, low-resolution thumbnails as the default images.
- Never use images as a text replacement for important content you want indexed.
For more information on using images in your site, see the blog post Images and Flash and script, oh my! (SEM 101).
Site review task: Review your pages for the use of images as content to be sure you provide useful, keyword-rich (indexable) text in ![]()
tag alt attribute.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Coming up next: We'll look at some site-wide issues that can prevent your site from ranking well. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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For webmasters who work hard to build and publish their sites, it can be frustrating when their sites are barely indexed and rank poorly across all search engines. They may think, "Why does this happen? What can I do to improve this?"
The reasons for poor ranking are nearly as myriad as the number of sites on the Web. Your site may be competing against some very well established, well-designed sites in your industry niche. Your competitors may have published a ton of useful, expert content, or have implemented a blog or forum where all of your industry's customers go for information, thus earning them tons of valuable visitors and backlinks. And frankly, it could be that those competing sites have seriously invested in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts when you have not. If your page ranking is not where you want it to be, your site may be due for a serious examination, one that looks for problems to solve and uses optimization techniques that are meaningful to both human visitors and search engine bots alike. You may be ready to consider a site review.
A site review is a method of diagnosing issues that may prevent a site from ranking well and/or driving user traffic. It works by looking at both on-page and site-wide factors that may be getting in the way of optimal performance.
While it can be helpful to have a professional consultant conduct a site review for you, with a little background on what to look for, you can perform a basic site review of your own site and develop a response plan for site improvement.
Why review my site?
Doing a site review is the first step in optimizing your site for search. But more importantly, it's also the first step in optimizing your site for users. The same problems that negatively affect search ranking often interfere with the user experience as well, so investing in a site review can make a very big difference in how your site performs for all of your visitors.
For many busy businesses and individuals, time is of the essence when publishing a new site. Corners are often cut, and well-planned optimization is often an early victim of a tight deadline or resource budget. Site improvements, promised after the initial releases are published, are typically iterative and happen as time and resources become available, if done at all (and as you well know, if you depend on the fire-fighting folks in the IT department for your site updates, free time and resources for them are rare commodities). And even then, if you get the opportunity to make improvements, someone first needs to determine what improvements need to be made.
The framework for site reviews isn't mysterious. There are clearly defined patterns of technical errors and oversights all webmasters should look for that can affect how well a site performs with ranking. A site review illuminates those issues for resolution.
A site review can be a way to focus efforts on identifying and prioritizing the improvement tasks that'll bring the biggest bang for the resource investment buck. In other cases, a site that ranks well may still not be performing well for users, or vice versa. The site review process can help identify why this is happening and how to correct it. Lastly, if you are ranking well today, it may be because your competitors have not yet optimized their sites (which could change at any time!). In this case, running a site review to look for ways to further improve your site's performance is an investment in maintaining your position at the top (and perhaps expand your reach into other keyword realms).
Time and resources
One thing to keep in mind about doing SEO work is that it's not an instant fix. Neither is it a one-time job. The optimization changes made to a site often take time to show the full extent of their benefit. And to continue to see benefits, SEO work needs to be done on an ongoing basis. It's important to communicate to your web team and/or your management that they need to reset expectations about level of effort and time needed for SEO work. This is not to say it's not a worthwhile effort to make or to too costly to do. To the contrary, it's an excellent investment if you want your website to be more successful in search and with users. Just be realistic about expectations. Short duration, small resource investments in SEO will usually not yield the results that folks typically want.
Over the next several posts, I'll share with you some problematic issues we here at Bing see as we crawl websites and break down each one so that you can conduct a productive review on your own site. Let's start with where to begin.
Examine site goals
A site review begins by actively thinking about what goals you have for your site. Why do you have a website? What do you want from your site's visitors? What do your visitors want from your site? If you are looking for conversions (where you "convert" a casual visitor into someone who actively buys your product or service, opens a document or media file, or provides their email address to subscribe to a newsletter), look at your site from a new visitor's perspective. Is the site easy to use? Is it easy for users to find the information they seek? Are there any obstacles in place that make conversions unnecessarily hard to complete? Solicit honest, objective feedback from people who have never been to your site or perhaps from customers who are critical. You might be surprised by what you hear. Consider constructive criticism to be an opportunity for improvement.
Site review task: Define the business goals of your website and what you want site visitors to do once there. Then, as a result of the site review process, determine what can be done to facilitate those goals, prioritized so that resource or budget constraints won't prevent you from picking the lowest hanging fruit.
Baseline your site's current performance
While you're soliciting feedback and reviewing site goals, take a baseline measurement of your site's performance today. Think about the performance metrics that you want to know and improve upon, in addition to search engine ranking (which is hard to actively control). If you haven't yet used web analytics, now is the time to start. If you do use them now, run a baseline performance report before any changes are made to the site. Note the metrics important to your business, such as (for example):
- Total visitors per month/week/day
- New vs. returning visitors
- Most viewed pages
- Entry pages
- Exit pages
- Bounce rate
- Click-through paths from entry page to exit page
- Referring domains
- Referring pages
- Referring search engines
- and which keywords and key phrases they typed
- Visitors by country
- For site offering subscriptions to email newsletters: number of sign-ups
- For resource sites: number of downloads
- For e-commerce sites:
- Conversation rate of visitor to purchase
- Drop-off rate during shopping cart experience
- Frequent purchasers vs. infrequent or one-time purchasers
Get a snapshot to see how well your site is performing today. After all, you can't truly improve what you don't measure.
If your site review uncovers issues that need to be changed (and they typically do), you can then document how the changes you made, if done incrementally and methodically, affected the performance of those metrics. Your business manager will appreciate that.
Site review task: Gather pre-optimization web analytics data on site performance.
Get your webmaster tools
To get a better handle on many of the issues that could be preventing your site from ranking as well as it should, one of the first steps should be to register your site with the various webmaster tools and services provided by the major search engines (we naturally suggest you start with the Bing Webmaster Center tools . You'll need to retrieve and then place a custom authentication code on your site to use these tools, but once that's done, you'll get access to detailed information reflecting what the Bing search engine bot found about your site. With these tools in place, you'll be armed and ready to begin identifying the improvements you can make to your site that'll increase the likelihood of better rank scores and, as a result, more user traffic.
As a prelude to the deeper site review issues we're going to discuss going forward, I also suggest installing the Free SEO Toolkit from the Microsoft IIS team. Your site doesn't need to run on IIS Server to use this amazing tool. You only need to use a client computer that can run a local version of IIS 7 or better (such as Windows Vista and Windows 7). For more information on installing and running the SEO Toolkit, see the blog post IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0 hits the streets! (SEM 101).
Site review task: Download and install or register your site to use the many webmaster tools that will assist in your site review and optimization project.
Review the search engine guidelines
There are a whole slew of on-page issues that, if omitted or implemented incorrectly, can adversely affect the ability of search bots to effectively crawl your site and thus hinder your ranking. To see what Bing recommends you do to improve how your site is indexed by our bot, please first review our online Help topic Guidelines for successful indexing.
Once you have reviewed the Bing guidelines, it's time to see what on-page issues there may be on your site that could benefit from optimization. I recommend you use the Free SEO Toolkit discussed in the Site Review Part 1 post to run a report and review your page code to see if any of the issues mentioned going forward affect your pages.
Site review task: Review webmaster guidelines documents from Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Coming up next: We'll look at some of the on-page issues that can hinder your site from reaching its optimum performance. See you soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Today’s forum thread of note is a discussion around what can be done to optimize image content for SEO. Several members of the Bing Webmaster Center forum community have chimed in with helpful advice.
What do you do on your site to optimize images? What have you found to be most important when adding images to a website? Join in the conversation!
To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out How do we optimize images? Is it necessary to optimize the images? in Webmaster Center's General Questions & Feedback forum. As always, many thanks to everyone who contributed to this forum topic!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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We have another interesting conversation thread to highlight today as our latest From the Forums column selection. One of our helpful users in the Bing community posted his list of the top "45 points for SEO." This post has generated a good many forum reader replies – most positive, a few critical, and many contributing their own additional points to the conversation.
What are your top tech tips for SEO? What have you done to improve your site? What's been successful for you? Join in the conversation!
To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out 45 points how to be the best SEO in Webmaster Center's Search Engine Marketing (SEM) forum. Many thanks to all who have contributed to the forum community on this topic!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. I've got many more SEM 101 posts and other, more technical blog articles coming your way soon, so stay tuned! See you again soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Today’s highlighted conversation in the From the Forums column has a user ask, "What are the most important tasks for SEO?". The conversation started back a while ago, but the quantity and quality of ideas generated are interesting to peruse. I want to specifically point out the recent post to this conversation by Brett Yount, our forums administrator (who, as of late, seems to be receiving more and more queries addressed to "Mr. Bing"), in which he stresses the value of identifying your site's target audience and working to develop expert content for them. It's useful advice that I wanted everyone to see.
To see the forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out What is the important task of SEO? in Webmaster Center's Search Engine Marketing (SEM) forum. Many thanks to all who have contributed to the forum community on this question!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. See you again soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Today’s installment of the From the Forums column involves a user who had difficulties getting the required authentication code installed on the default page of her website so she could take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Center tools.
The customized authentication code issued by Bing Webmaster Center ensures that only the site owner who registered with Webmaster Center can get access to the detailed information about the site as collected by the Bing search crawler. Unfortunately, some users have difficulty in getting the authentication code installed. As a result, Webmaster Center cannot validate the site owner logon process and thus blocks access to the site's data through the tools.
Bing Webmaster Center offers two methods of installing the authentication code onto a website:
- Upload a Bing-provided XML file containing the code to the root directory of the website
- Add a custom tag containing the code to the website's default page
This process is explained in detail in the Webmaster Center online Help topic Authenticate your website.
Forums volunteer Archie Watts assessed the likely situation and shared his experiences with how to manage the authentication process. The issue in question appeared to stem from the same problem/solution recently added to the Webmaster Center FAQ:
Q: I'm not able to gain access to Webmaster Center with the authentication code used in a tag. Can you help?
A: The Webmaster Center online Help topic Authenticate your website recommends using a tag formed as follows:
< meta name =”msvalidate.01″ content =”0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF” />
However, some users attempt to combine the flow of authentication codes for multiple sites in the tags. If you must use the tag method of authentication (as opposed to the XML file authentication method as described in the Help topic), we recommend placing your Bing Webmaster Center authentication code last so that it is not followed by a space. In addition, Webmaster Center does look for the proper XHTML-based closing of the tag – the " />", so be sure to use this closing in your code.
To see the forum conversation thread, check out Why can't I change my site's profile or update contact info or even go to the Profile page??? in the General Questions and Feedback forum. Many thanks to Archie Watts for his excellent contribution to the Bing Webmaster Center forum community!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. See you again soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away.
The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question. It was soon uncovered that the 301 redirects implemented by the site were also applied to a custom 404 error message page, which itself provided search engines with a 200 OK code, thereby indicating that everything is good (instead of the typical 404 File Not Found error, which would facilitate the removal of those page listings from the index). Brett Yount, our forums administrator, did a quick check with the Bing engineering team, who confirmed that this was the likely reason the old content remained in the Bing index. The webmaster for the site is now looking into the matter with his web team with specific resolution advice in hand for resolving this situation.
This is an interesting case of having a content migration plan in place and demonstrating wise patience for changes to propagate through the system. But when an undiscovered error in the migration plan's implementation occurred, thereby preventing the desired result with search, the webmaster came to the Webmaster Center forum to get the advice they needed to resolve the issue. Check out Again….301 Redirect issue with Bing…going crazy here to see the whole conversation.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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We in the Bing Webmaster Center team are very fortunate to have such a bright, vibrant, and helpful community of users in our Webmaster Center forums. From time to time, I will take a moment to highlight some useful and interesting threads found in the forums in this new blog column.
The goal of this new, periodically published column is multifold. First, I want to identify the Webmaster Center forums as a useful resource for webmasters and SEOs who have questions pertaining to Bing, our Webmaster Center tools, or about search-related issues in general. Second, I also want to highlight this growing community of terrific VIP participants. They are amazing in how much they do to help their fellow webmasters and SEOs. Lastly (but not least!), I especially want to thank our forums administrator, Brett Yount, for making our forums such a great information resource for both active participants and quiet lurkers alike.
From time to time, I will publish quick blog posts highlighting an interesting thread of conversation or a useful nugget of information that I think our blog readers might also want to read. Today's forum conversation of note is the ongoing thread regarding how one can get a relatively new website to rank well in the search index, with a specific follow-up question about the value of actively dropping backlinks in forum comments:
How to get a high PR without paying?
This thread includes some interesting and useful comments from volunteer contributors Dr Aldus, Quality Directory, JSherrod, and many others. Enjoy!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. Until next time…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can't wait to share with you (patience, Grasshopper – all will be revealed in time). But the blog waits for no one (well, that's the intent, anyway). From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it's that time again. So let's get to it.
Q: I'm not able to gain access to Webmaster Center with the authentication code used in a tag. Can you help?
A: The Webmaster Center online Help topic Authenticate your website recommends using a tag formed as follows:
< meta name =”msvalidate.01″ content =”0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF” />
However, some users attempt to combine the flow of authentication codes for multiple sites in the tags. If you must use the tag method of authentication (as opposed to the XML file authentication method as described in the Help topic), we recommend placing your Bing Webmaster Center authentication code last so that it is not followed by a space. In addition, Webmaster Center does look for the proper XHTML-based closing of the tag – the " />", so be sure to use this closing in your code.
This issue is discussed further in the Webmaster Center forum topic Site Verification Error for Bing Webmasters Tools.
Q: Why do I have to register as a user in the Webmaster Center blog just to post a comment?
A: We were getting a few non-registered visitors who were posting way too much spam in the blog comments. We needed to block that junk from being posted, so we implemented a new rule that requires folks to register before they can leave comments. Since we can control spam from registered user accounts, we felt this was the best course for minimizing the disruption of irrelevant comments. We hope this is not a hardship on anyone!
Q: I've posted two random blog comments requesting inclusion of my site into Bing News Service? Why haven't you added my site?
A: Let's redirect those requests to the right place. To request that Bing add your news site to our list of news sources, we ask that you send the request via email to the Bing News Service team. Please be sure to identify yourself, your URL, what types of news you provide, your audience, and any other determining factors such as awards won, etc.
Q: I have a very complicated or specific question to ask about my site and the Bing index. Can you answer it here?
A: Blog comments are best used for furthering the conversation about the associated blog article. Specialized service requests or specific questions about Bing products and services requiring detailed, individualized answers are always better left in the Bing Webmaster Center forums as a starting place. We have a forums administrator on staff who, along with the regular VIP contributors there, can offer helpful advice and insight to your questions. There are some amazing folks participating over there!
Q: How do I get my company listed in the Bing local listings?
A: Use the Bing Local Listing Center form. You may need to sign in to your Webmaster Center account or create a new sign-in account to access this form.
Q: How can I ensure that my local business contact information (address and phone number) from my website get into the Bing index?
A: One common problem we see with this is that some sites rely solely upon an image containing text to convey this information. This is not good practice for SEO. If you want to be sure MSNBot (or any other search engine bot) can to read such information, please add it to your website as text (the image is OK as long as the text version also exists)!
Q: Your recent posts on web spam has brought up a question: how do I report web spam that I find in search engine results pages to Bing?
A: To report web spam sites, we recommend that you go to the Bing Support web form to file the complaint. In the Problem list, select Content Removal Request. In the resulting list box, select Other. In the comments text box, include specific and detailed information in your report. Complete the rest of the form and then click Submit.
A member of the Bing web spam team will review the report and investigate the matter. If the report is accurate, appropriate action will be taken. Note that if the report is malicious and false, no action will be taken against the accused site.
Q: My website offers tax-related services. As a result, I use the word "tax" numerous times in my content. Could Bing consider my site to be web spam due to the appearance of keyword stuffing? When do I cross the line from acceptable to web spam?
A: The key here always comes back to how the content appears to the human reader. Is it logical? Is it readable? Does it make sense? In this particular case, the repeated use of the word "tax" in content regarding tax services offered is reasonably expected and thus is fine. In fact, including a solid set of explanatory content that defines these keyword phrases only strengthens the case for reasonably repeating this word. If the use of this repeated word makes contextual sense to the reader and is not a clumsy attempt to stuff the word in where it's not necessary or helpful, and you have a good amount of supporting content to accompany it, you'll be fine. Our crawler sees this usage and understands it is legitimate. Just write your content for the reader's comprehension and the crawler will not penalize you for keyword stuffing.
The important thing to remember is that true web spam often involves multiple issue violations. As such, it typically takes more than one violation to trigger web spam consequences – having a slightly above average number of keywords won't automatically torpedo your site. Just as you need to do several things well to improve your ranking (build good content, build valuable inbound links, target several keywords, etc.), you need to do several things wrong to really hurt your ranking. That said, if it's obvious that you are trying to abuse the system, even with just one egregious issue, then penalties will ensue.
Lastly, we don't define any borderline between acceptable and non-acceptable web spam. If you think what you've done might be considered web spam because you know you're trying to game the system, then take a different approach to optimizing your pages. I'll repeat my mantra: write content for the human reader, not the crawler. Develop good, unique content that is readable, understandable, and valuable. If you do this without involving any black-hat, SEO-style trickery in an effort to artificially boost your ranking, then you'll never have to worry about this being an issue.
Q: Regarding backlinks in forum comments and link-level web spam, is it only a problem when the page linked to is not relevant to the conversation in the forum, or is this a problem for all backlinks?
A: It always comes down to whether the effort is intended to legitimately benefit the human reader or benefit the owner of the link. If the link in a blog comment is relevant to the content in both the blog article and the blog comment and as an extension to that content, is of value and interest to the reader, then it is not a problem. In fact, this is a fine idea (whether or not the rel=”nofollow” attribute is automatically applied by the blog to user-generated links). However, if the link in the blog comment is not relevant to either the blog article or the blog comment's content, is not of relevant, legitimate interest to the reader, and instead is only beneficial to the link owner, then that is web spam. It's pretty straight-forward.
Also consider how the blog comment link is formed, as in whether it is a single link inline to the comment's content or is it a bazooka blast consisting of multiple, irrelevant links following a short, generic message that could be applicable to anything (or nothing). If your goal is to tell the reader about some information relevant to the post and that info is found within good content on your site, that's great. Add those links! Even if rel=”nofollow” is employed by the blog in all UGC-based links, the potential for driving live traffic to your site is good, and if the content there is worthwhile, that will improve public awareness of that content and ultimately be a good link building strategy. But if the comment is merely an excuse for blatant advertising links, it is web spam. Note the difference in intent. If you do right by the reader, you'll be fine.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
[Link]
Microsoft Silverlight is a transformative technology. It enables otherwise basic websites to act as full-blown applications, provides access to state-of-the-art animation and video rich media presentations, and takes full advantage of your development team's existing experience in standard programming languages, such as C#.
However, there is one little problem. Like competing rich Internet application (RIA) technologies that present images, animations, and videos, all of that non-text-based content is extremely hard for search engines to parse and index. As a result, many website owners who are initially thrilled at the cutting edge presentation shown on their websites are later confounded when their beautiful sites suddenly fail to show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The problem is that the very technology used with the intention of blowing away their customers, when not thoughtfully implemented, can literally blow away their page rank as a result. In those cases, the site developer/webmaster failed to account for search engine optimization (SEO) when they implemented Silverlight.
Silverlight applications are packaged up for deployment into files with the extension .xap. These files represent the instructions to start the application and, in most cases, contain the content of the application. Unfortunately, search engines can't easily read Silverlight XAP files. Yes, the technical parsing and content extraction capabilities used in the world of search are improving every day. But as of today, you'd be wise to cater to what the search engines already do very well: read text. This means you need to add text-based information -metadata and more – to the Silverlight objects you employ on your website.
You might think it's not worth the effort to do such work. If you don't care about being found in search, you might have a point! But consider this: if some of your intended clients use operating systems or web browsers that are unsupported by Silverlight, what will they see when they go to your Silverlight-enabled site? Will the site still be usable? Will its presentation still make sense? Or will the page be blank? Do you even know?
If you care about these audiences, then the same backward compatibility work you'd do to help them will also serve you in your SEO efforts. As an overall investment, if you want to use advanced content technologies to improve the user experience for your customers, you might well want to invest in making your site more accessible to all potential users, including search engine crawlers (aka bots).
Basic SEO
Right off the bat, there are several things you can do to help the search engine bot learn more about your Silverlight-infused pages. Because bots cannot "read" Silverlight content the way we can, the wise addition of metadata is all the more important in these pages. This information helps the bots interpret what is the theme of the page, how the content relates to other pages and sites, and provides keywords to help the search engine understand the page well enough to rank it accurately among other, relevant sites for search users.
Much of this advice is actually basic SEO, but as Bing so commonly sees RIA-laden pages that possess none of this information, it bears repeating here. All of your RIA-based (including Silverlight) pages, should have these elements in the source code (in fact, most of these suggestions apply equally to even non-RIA-based pages within a website):
- Descriptive tag. Every page should include a descriptive and unique tag. That information is part of what a bot reads to assess what sort of content is contained on the page. Using a title such as Silverlight application is about as useless as no tag at all. Get specific!
- Descriptive name="description" tag. Another important page element that bots use to determine the contents of a page is the text within the "description" tag. This information is often used to help create the website description snippet used on a SERP. As before, don't go generic here – be specific and unique. There is often so little text-based information on a Silverlight page that every little bit of unique content will be that much more meaningful to the search engine indexer.
- Descriptive
tags.
The first level heading is second only to the tag for being the place to define the thematic contents of a page. As such, stick to only one iteration per page, but make it meaningful and unique.
- Discoverable navigation. No man is an island, but a web page with no discernible navigation links to other pages might be. And any page built without any discoverable navigation to other pages must not be very important – at least, that's the way bots will see it. Be sure every page on your site is linked to at least one other page, and link out to other pages from every page so the bot doesn't get stuck in a blind alley and abandon crawling your site any further.
- Descriptive alt text. When you add an
![]()
tag to your page, be sure to provide that additional meta content. Bots can't read the contents of that image, even if it is merely an image of text, so the alt text you add is critical for helping the bot better understand what it cannot see.
- Meaningful application name. Just as there is some SEO value to creating human-friendly URLs, where the directory and file names spell out logical words rather than globally unique identifier (GUID)-based gibberish, there is value to naming your Silverlight application in a manner that helps identify its purpose or role in the page. An object in the page code identifying "SilverlightApp1" is meaningless to everyone but the originating developer (and even then, it's questionable!).
Every one of these elements is an opportunity to develop keywords for your pages. Be sure to use keyword-rich text in every opportunity. But as always, do so wisely. Keep it readable and oriented for human readers, not stuffed for bots. Keyword stuffing will only get your site in trouble.
Graceful degradation
OK, so the basic SEO stuff has been knocked out, but what more can you do for a Silverlight page? As it turns out, we've only just begun to optimize.
The key to success in ensuring that down-level users will not be abandoned when you use an advanced technology like Silverlight is to implement a graceful degradation strategy. That means if a client, for whatever reason, cannot access the advanced primary technology offered (in this case, Silverlight), they still have a means to get something out of the page by means of lesser, secondary technology, be it metadata, substitute text on the page, a static image, or whatever else you can provide, content-wise, to assist those users.
To provide that graceful degradation experience to your users, modify your Silverlight pages to include one or more of the following solutions.
1. Present alternate, static page content
Instead of using the tag, use the tag to instantiate your Silverlight content in your page. The tag allows the page to provide secondary, down-level content to be presented in case the initial, primary content (such as a Silverlight application) cannot be presented. By using the tag, you can include text descriptions and other relevant content following the instantiation of the application in the code. Write these text descriptions toward the non-Silverlight user, describing the Silverlight application's role on the page, its function, or any other pertinent information that would help down-level users understand what would have been shown if they were able to access Silverlight. Be sure to use your page's targeted keywords as you describe the Silverlight content.
Below is an example of how you can include contextual, alternative information within your page's Silverlight tag code:
< object data =”data:application/x-silverlight-2,” style =”display: block" type =”application/x-silverlight-2″ >
< param name =”minRuntimeVersion” value =”3.0.40624.0″ />
< param name =”source” value =”ClientBin/KingCountyTrafficMap.xap” />
< div class =”down-level” >
< h1 >Traffic Map for King County, Washington h1 >
< img src =”KingCountyAfternoonTraffic.jpg” alt =”Typical King County metro weekday rush-hour traffic at 5:00pm" />
< p >Silverlight enabled computers can use this page to see up-to-date traffic conditions on the major roads and highways in King County, Washington. p >
< p >It's easy to < a href =”http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/” >install Silverlight a > on your computer. See what you've been missing! p >
div >
object >
As you can see, the alternative content included the important
tag and some informative content identifying the role of the Silverlight application. And by providing a link to installing Silverlight, you might enable another user to step up and see your page in its primary view.
2. Use multiple sections
Another strategy for creating a graceful degradation of Silverlight includes using multiple sections on the page: one for the actual Silverlight content and another to be shown on computers that do not have Silverlight installed. Similar to the previous example, this technique sample demonstrates the presentation of static page content:
< div id =”King County Traffic Map" >
< object data =”data:application/x-silverlight-2,” style =”display: block" type =”application/x-silverlight-2″ >
< param name =”minRuntimeVersion” value =”3.0.40624.0″ />
< param name =”source” value =”ClientBin/KingCountyTrafficMap.xap” />
object >
< iframe style =”visibility: hidden; height: 0; width: 0; border: 0px" > iframe >
div >
< div id =”AlternativeContent” style =”display: none" >
< h1 >Traffic Map for King County, Washington h1 >
< img src =”KingCountyAfternoonTraffic.jpg” alt =”Typical King County metro weekday rush-hour traffic at 5:00pm" />
< p >Silverlight enabled computers can use this page to see up-to-date traffic conditions on the major roads and highways in King County, Washington. p >
< p >It's easy to < a href =”http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/” >install Silverlight a > on your computer. See what you've been missing! p >
div >
Note that the alternative is created by default as hidden content. Contrary to the generic advice given in the recent page-level web spam article, The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam, the use of hidden content in this case is recognized by the search engine as contextually related to the graceful degradation strategy for Silverlight. As such, its use in this case will not raise any red flags to the search engine concerning potential web spam. As usual for these types of things, interpreting user intent is key to search engine bots identifying whether or not an ambiguous page element might be malicious.
3. Expose alternate, dynamic content
What if you are using Silverlight for more than just a single webpage application? What if you have a site-wide, Silverlight application used in an e-commerce scenario? In that case, you'll want to expose your inventory catalog of deep link content to search rather than have it left invisible in Silverlight. For this, you'll need to take a different approach. The alternate content here must describe any and all end point(s) that you want to make available to the search engine bot.
Instead of doing a deep dive here on this technique (this article is already getting long!), I'll instead refer you to a few useful resources of information on how to expose these end points to the non-Silverlight user and the bot. Both include good code examples and a clear explanation of how the technique is employed:
4. Use the createObject function in JavaScript
This is a more developer-oriented SEO strategy that you can employ with Silverlight. This technique uses JavaScript to automatically generate the markup code needed to create the tag and its required parameters.
Again, as no one wants to read a white paper posing as a blog column, I will simply point you to helpful resources for more information:
Test the new down-level experiences
Once you've implemented your Silverlight graceful degradation strategy, test it in non-Silverlight-enabled environments. Popular choices among SEOs include text-based, web browser environments such as Lynx browser or SEO-browser. You can also use operating systems currently incompatible with Silverlight, such as Windows 98, Linux, FreeBSD, or SolarisOS, or unsupported web browsers, such as Opera. For details on Silverlight compatibility, see the list of Compatible Operating Systems and Browsers.
Planning graceful degradation of Silverlight for SEO is identical to planning for those clients that are not Silverlight-enabled. Once your pages present useful, alternative content to non-Silverlight clients using the suggestions above, you can rest assured that search engine bots will also be able to see the results of your effort. And until bots can read RIA-based multimedia content like humans can, that is how you do SEO with Silverlight.
For additional information on performing SEO on Silverlight-enabled webpages, see the following:
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. I'll be back soon!
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
[Link]
When a key opens a lock, it typically provides the key's holder with a clear path to where he or she wants to go. Keywords and key phrases do the same for a website. They help direct searchers to content they wish to see on the Internet. But there is a key difference: whereas a lock key will typically match up with only one lock, keywords can lead a searcher down multiple paths to many matching, relevant websites. It is a filtering process that leads the holder to the destination to which they want to go. (At least that's how it's supposed to work – see my recent article on keyword web spam for times when this is not the case.)
Search engines are still heavily oriented toward text-based content. Even when other media types are indexed, it is typically done so using text-based descriptions. Search engine users separate the wheat from the chaff on the Internet by searching for words that are relevant to the information they seek. That is their key. Smart webmasters, anticipating those users who will employ search to find content similar to what they've published, can boost their chances of bringing searchers to their websites by using the same words in their content that searchers will in their searches. It's simply matching keys to unlocking (revealing) the content you want.
Sometimes the keywords and key phrases searchers will use for a given field of interest are obvious, but that's not always good news for webmasters. If these keywords are obvious to you, it's likely that they are obvious to everyone, and if your site falls into one of those fields, all of your competitors' websites will be using those same keywords.
The long tail of search
If this is the case for you, there's no need to despair – there is hope. There's an often-overlooked truism in our industry: search has a long tail. Most webmasters only work to identify their sites with the head, so there's typically a lot of untapped value to be had in working on that long tail.
What do I mean by head and tail? Consider the form of a tadpole. Much of its mass is in the big head, but then its form flows into a long, tapering tail. Graphs of keyword search trends often look like a tadpole with a very long tail. A few primary keywords typically dominate a sizable percentage of the search traffic, but then there are secondary and even tertiary keywords. By themselves, they are clearly not as effective as the primary keywords, as fewer users search on them. But there are people who either search directly on them or use them as a part of longer queries, and those users are just as valuable as conversion opportunities as users of primary keywords. The key distinction here is that most webmasters do not bother to actively compete for those potential customers in the long tail.
If you are in an industry that has a few heavy-hitter, powerhouse websites as competitors, whose webmasters have worked hard to develop great content and earn authoritative backlinks, it can be as frustrating as chasing your own tail for a smaller upstart to compete with those sites using the same primary keywords. Competing in the long tail can be a great way to mop up some otherwise untapped business and begin to develop a name and reputation for your website. It's always better to compete for a high rank for a few keywords in the tail than to merely settle for a middling or worse rank for the most popular keywords in the head (settling for mediocrity is what most webmasters do, and thus why there's so often good opportunities for the taking).
And with the time you spend successfully targeting the long tail keyword opportunities, if you make the effort to simultaneously develop quality content and work to earn authoritative inbound links for that content, your site will only increase in stature. At that point, you can start thinking about getting more competitive for those primary keywords in the head as well.
Make it so
So all of that sounds fine in concept. But how do you execute on such a plan? You have to know what keywords are being used in your field. You need to know what keywords you need to use on your website. You need to make your website a legitimate target for searchers who use those keywords. To get such keyword intelligence, you need a great keyword tool. One that is easy to use, draws from strong industry data sources, and offers a variety of views of that data. Frankly, I suggest you take a look at Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is the successor to the 2009 beta tool called adCenter Excel Add-in Keyword Research Tool. As you might have inferred by its previous moniker, it installs as an add-in to Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (it won't work with any previous versions of Excel, however). You'll need an account with adCenter to gain access to the keyword data, but that's easily enough done, and there's no cost for setting up the account. Note that the tool was designed for users of search marketing (aka Pay Per Click [PPC] ads). However, the research needed to develop strong-performing keywords for PPC ads parallels that of keywords for search engine optimization (SEO), and thus the tool is easily repurposed for those efforts.
Once installed, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is presented as a tab on the Excel ribbon named Ad Intelligence. Click that tab, and from there, you have access to a series of helpful tools that can help you perform the following tasks:
- Extract current keywords from an existing site
- Create new keywords by starting with an existing list, a webpage, or by selecting a vertical
- Expand current list of keywords by examining advertiser bidding selections and analysis of search query data
- Analyze keyword performance by query, time, demographics, geo-location, and more
- Identify the categories using that keyword and drill down to common queries
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for keywords and compare yours against industry averages
- Look up typical PPC keyword pricing for particular keywords
- Learn the click-through-rate (CTR) and the cost per click (CPC) around your chosen match-type position
- Learn about industry KPIs and learn more about your own particular vertical, including the average CTR and CPC, and then compare your performance against your vertical's average
I recommend that, immediately after installation, you first configure the tool to work with your adCenter account. In the Options & Help section of the ribbon, click Options, and then fill in the User name and Password fields with your adCenter credentials. Click Test Connection to confirm everything is ready to go. Once you get a message box confirming the connection was good, click OK to close the open dialog boxes.
There are nine tool buttons on the ribbon, some containing multiple, related tools. Instead of me trying to explain all of the cool stuff that Microsoft Advertising Intelligence can do, I'll simply refer you to the tool's website for technical documentation, its active community forum, and the numerous video tutorials.
Identify the long tail
Once you've installed the tool, you can use it to pull a list of the current keywords used on your website today. Here's how:
- In Excel's Ad Intelligence tab, click the Keyword Wizards tool, select the option Extract from website, and then click Next.
- Type the URL you want to use, and then click Next.
- You can first review the keywords extracted by clicking Review, and then click Next to continue.
- Select the option Queries That Contain Your Keyword to see other keywords based on those extracted from your site, and then click Next.
- You can either change the setting Maximum suggested keywords or use the default. Click Next to continue.
- Click Review to see the updated list, and then click Next.
- To see historical data on the usage of the keywords in your list, click Monthly traffic, and then click Next.
- You can then modify the range of dates for historical usage performance data retrieved as well as for forward prediction usage or keep the defaults.
- Click Finish to get your report.
In the resulting report, you can change the sort order of any of the columns of data to see which keywords and key phrases had the highest CTR on any particular month or in aggregate.
If you want to be very specific in conducting your research and customizing your reports, you can skip the keyword wizard and instead use the other tools in Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to narrow down keywords for specific verticals, demographics (including age, gender, and location), and more. You'll see which words are the highest performers, and how those words have performed recently.
This is powerful information, and you'll learn which words are being used in your field at which frequency. Check your site's keywords against those who are the movers and shakers in your field, and you may discover some under-utilized keywords in the long tail of search that may be a golden opportunity for your site.
Once you do, implement them wisely on your site, and then monitor your site's progress over the coming weeks and months. For advice on implementing keywords wisely, check out our earlier blog articles on using keywords, including Put your keywords where the emphasis is (SEM 101) and The key to picking the right keywords (SEM 101). Whatever you do, don't follow the examples of keyword abuse documented in the blog article The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam (SEM 101). Remember that SEO is not an overnight quick fix. Time is needed for crawling and reindexing changed content from the search engine side and then for searchers to find you. Patience, along with hard, smart work, will pay off. (And don't ignore other aspects of a thoughtful SEO plan that can improve ranking as well, such as creating great, unique content and earning authoritative, high-quality inbound links!)
So stop chasing your own tail. Instead, invest in chasing the long tail of search by using a keyword intelligence tool like Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. That is the key for unlocking success in search.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. See you again soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
[Link]
When I was a kid in high school, I used to go to the public library and do initial research in the Encyclopedia Britannica (yes, the bound book editions. I also remember black & white television with vacuum tubes and rotary telephones! Sheesh, I'm getting old!). I would pick up the index volume that contained the keyword I wanted to look up to identify which of the main volumes had the content I sought.
But imagine this: when I opened up the referenced main volume to the page specified, I always found the content I wanted. I never once went to the content page referenced in the index and found a page full of advertisements, come-ons for dubious physical enhancement pharmaceuticals, or any irrelevant, unwanted garbage like that. That's how Internet search is supposed to work, too.
Search engine as master index
However, unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, which maintained sole control over the information it published (thus making its index a really good bet for finding the content you want), the fast and loose world of the Internet is open to all comers, for better or for worse. The good of that trait allows for information of all types, from highly important to trivial (and in all ranges of value, from well-researched reports to skewed opinions to deceptive trash), to be found, but you must know where to look. This is where a search engine's role as master indexer comes into play. Services like Bing use their own resources to scan the Web for content and organize their findings into a useful index of the available content for users.
But since no one entity has control over the content placed on the Web, the useful and informative website is joined by the unscrupulous huckster, who spends a huge amount of effort to deceive the search engine index in order to bring unsuspecting web searchers to their irrelevant website. This deception is the core of web spam.
Bing and other search engine service providers work diligently to detect and eliminate web spam-tainted results from getting into our search engine results pages (SERPs). It's a tough battle, and it requires a great deal of work to keep our SERPs useful and legitimate for search customers.
We’ve already discussed the basic definition of web spam and one of the two major implementations, page-level web spam, in previous blog articles. We'll wrap up this web spam series with a discussion of the other major type, link-level web spam. And finally, we'll discuss what a webmaster can do to restore their website's listing (removing penalties) with Bing once the detected web spam has been removed.
Definition of link-level web spam
Link-level web spam uses web link deceptions in an attempt to artificially inflate the page rank of a specific page or site. Savvy webmasters know that earning high quality, relevant inbound links from authoritative sites can have a very positive influence on the search engine's rank of the linked site – we recently published a blog post on this subject titled, Link building for smart webmasters (no dummies here). This is good search engine optimization (SEO). Some less savvy and/or more unscrupulous folks believe they can simply substitute the "high quality, relevant" part of the equation for high quantity and swap "authoritative sites" for either junk or irrelevant sites and achieve the same goal. Sadly for them, this is not the case.
The intent of the link-level web spammer is to create huge numbers of inbound links (typically from unrelated, low quality sites) to attain illegitimate page rank for a site to fool web searchers into visiting their sites. Luckily, Bing and the other search engines can assess the quality and authority of a particular website.
Sites employing link-level techniques also often employ page-level web spam techniques to make their sites appear to be relevant to a commonly searched keyword when they are not. The use of link-level web spam techniques will cause a search engine to examine your site more deeply, and if it's determined to be using web spam techniques, your site could be penalized.
As we stated earlier with page-level web spam, some of these techniques can have valid uses at their core, but the intention behind their use is the distinguishing factor. When we detect deceptive intent as we crawl the Web, we identify those pages as web spam and penalize them as appropriate, ranging from neutralization (which levels the playing field for other sites offering content on the same subject) to expulsion from the index. As you can imagine, for an online-based business, these are serious consequences, so it pays to know what NOT to do when you optimize your site for search (or hire a consultant to do the same).
Post web spam
Definition: This is a form of user-generated content (UGC)-based outbound links posted in other web sites, such as in guest book pages, forums, blog comments, message boards, and referrer logs.
Problem: The destination links in post web spam are usually unrelated, topic-wise, to the page containing the UGC outbound link. Often these posts include multiple links. In sites that rely on post web spam for inbound links, it is not unusual for a sizable percentage of all of their inbound links to be from post web spam.
What we look for: Several techniques for implementing post web spam are commonly used, including:
- Add backlinks to all UGC content. When users go onto websites that allow UGC to be created, those who use post web spam include backlink URLs to their sites, even if they don't have anything to do with the comment or, more significantly, the theme of the UGC-sponsoring site.
- Automation. Spammers often use automated techniques to repeatedly submit the same UGC post containing short, generic text and a clickable URL to their sites in every UGC-sponsoring page possible.
- Keyword stuffing. Post web spam text is often keyword stuffed. Check out our page-level web spam article titled The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam for more information on this.
- Massive repetition. Lots of non-relevant, poor quality, inbound links come from such pages as online guest books, forums, and blog comments.
What post web spammers don't often realize is that many UGC-oriented pages automatically append the attribute rel=”nofollow” to any links created in UGC content. As such, no inbound link credit is derived when search engines crawl and index these pages.
From a webmaster point of view, however, we encourage active, regular cleaning up (or better yet, preventing) of UGC-based web spam content. If there is too much junk or web spam content on a page, it could reflect poorly on the overall quality of your page, even if you are employing rel=”nofollow” to URLs. For that matter, it is very important for any site that allows UGC content to actively monitor their site's security. Hosting malware can also get a site penalized, and you don't want that! For more information on malware, see our blog article series called The merciless malignancy of malware, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Link farming
Definition: A link farm is a large collection of websites that exist for the sole purpose of providing massive numbers of links to targeted websites, ostensibly to improve the appearance of their organic, online popularity.
Problem: Link farming is often employed to promote one website using many other websites or it can be a commercial enterprise in which the link farm sells its unscrupulous (and worthless) outbound linking services to less-SEO-savvy webmasters.
What we look for: Link farming is often implemented using the following techniques:
- Large, sudden surge of new inbound links. When dozens or hundreds of inbound links suddenly appear for a new or a previously small website, such a big change can indicate link farm web spam activity. The relevance of the outbound linking sites will be a key factor in whether or not such a sudden change warrants further investigation.
- Consistent similarities between outbound linking sites. If a large number of the inbound links for a site come from sites that are very similar in design, structure, and other key characteristics, this can lead to deeper scrutiny of a website for web spam.
- Poor linking standards. A link farm will often have a large number of unrelated links on the page, or will have related links to many sites that employ other spam methods.The pages themselves are designed to maximize the number of links on them, favoring outbound links rather than original content on the page.
When link farms are identified, those sites are penalized, which negates the value of the links they contain. In addition, the pages they link to are more likely to be heavily scrutinized for other forms of web spam.
See our earlier blog articles for more information on what makes a good link versus a bad link.
Link exchanges
Definition: Unlike link farms that target a few selected sites, link exchanges are organized groups of websites who participate in providing reciprocal inbound and outbound links ostensibly to benefit all websites in the exchange.
Problem: Web spam-oriented link exchanges typically involve unrelated web sites reciprocally exchanging links en masse for the purposes of rank inflation. As such, they offer no value to human visitors, and thus they are candidates for being considered web spam.
While earning inbound links are a part of legitimate SEO activities, as we've stated before, Bing values quality links over quantity of links. Inbound links from sites unrelated to the theme of your site, typical with most link exchanges, will be of little to no value to you for improving your page rank.
What we look for: Link exchanges usually include the following activities:
- Starts out as email spam. Link exchanges often start out as spam emails sent from webmasters of unrelated sites asking other webmasters if they would like to improve their ranking by exchanging links.
- Excessive links. Link exchanges (reciprocal links) between unrelated sites, especially when done to excess, can be indicators of web spam, and a participating website might be more heavily scrutinized for other web spam problems.
Note that reciprocal linking is not an automatic red flag. Some websites within a particular niche will link to others when it provides a relevant value to their customers. For example, think of a bed and breakfast who links out to local wineries and a winery who links out to local bed and breakfasts – these are interrelated activities to a region that are naturally relevant for site visitors.
But as usual, too much of a good thing can be bad. And when there is no relevance between linked sites, the value of link exchanges can quickly degrade down to the level of web spam (especially when the numbers of unrelated links is deemed excessive).
Penalties and restitution
Mistakes happen. An entrepreneurial do-it-yourselfer optimizes a website based on bad (spammy) advice from the Web. A Mom-and-Pop-shop website owner naively hires an unscrupulous website consultant. Heck, it's even possible that a search engine might mistakenly label an innocent site as web spam. So what do you do?
If you made a mistake on your site and your rank has been neutralized, the solution is easy. Web spam neutralization is handled automatically with Bing. If you are using web spam techniques on your website and you want to remove the site's web spam neutralization penalty, eliminate the web spam violations and then republish your website. Once the Bing crawler, MSNBot, recrawls your site, if the web spam violations have been removed, the neutralization will be automatically resolved in the index.
But what if your site has been purged from the Bing index? That requires some manual intervention.
Request reconsideration for your site
If you search for your site in the Bing index using the advanced search keyword phrase site:www.myURL.com (using your URL, of course!) and nothing turns up, your site is not in the index. If this is a sudden change and you know you've used some unscrupulous web spam techniques, you'll need help to get back into the index.
First of all, fix all of the web spam violations on your site. Not just one or two, but all of them. Then, once you've republished a corrected version of your website, contact Bing support to request reconsideration of your website's penalty. Here's how:
- Go to Bing E-mail Support and fill out the form completely
- Select Content Inclusion Request from the drop-down list. A new drop-down will appear underneath.
- From the new drop-down list, select Reinclusion request.
- Write a clear and detailed explanation of what you have done to resolve the problem in the next text box. (You can prepare this in advance, and then copy and paste the text into the form.)
- Type the security code from the presented image into the text box below.
- Once the form is completed, click submit.
A member of the Bing support team will quickly review your request and schedule your site to be recrawled. If the crawler determines that all of the violations have indeed been resolved, then your site is eligible to be added back into the index. But be patient – this process doesn't happen overnight (which is why it's a wise idea to avoid such web spam penalties in the first place).
For more information on Bing penalties and restitution, see the blog article Getting out of the penalty box.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Ranking Feedback and Discussion forum. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
P.S. It was suggested to me that I list the other articles in this web spam series for those who might be interested in reading the entire set, so here goes (in order of publication):
Enjoy!
Rick
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In the exciting world of today's Internet, where the world's information is literally at your fingertips, where you can endlessly communicate, shop, research, and be entertained, spam is a big downer. The unwanted email spam that fills our inboxes also consumes huge portions of the available bandwidth of our routers and trunk lines. But email is not the only spam game in town.
Web spam is the bane (well, one of the banes) of the search engine and web searcher communities. Search engines want to provide search users with a great experience, helping them find what they want as quickly and as easily as possible. Search users want to use search engines to get the right information they seek as quickly as possible. And webmasters want search users to find their websites, but also to get those search user visitors to become conversions instead of bounces.
Web spam, those unwanted garbage pages that use overtly deceptive search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and contain no valuable content, is a frustration to search engines and search users alike, and ultimately work against the best interests of conversion-seeking webmasters (severely annoying a potential customer is rarely a great sales technique!).
In the previous article that defined web spam and discussed how it is different from junk content, we mentioned that there are two types of web spam. In this article, we're going to delve into the details of the first type: page-level web spam.
Definition of page-level web spam
Page-level web spam uses on-page SEO trickery (not to be confused with link-level web spam, which we'll discuss in an upcoming article). Webmasters and optimizers for these sites do this because they believe they can fool the search engines into giving their webpages a higher-than-deserved ranking based on their content relevancy, often times for subject areas that are completely unrelated to the site's actual content. This is done in an effort to deceive searchers into visiting their spammy sites for a multitude of reasons, none of which usually benefit the end user.
The use of the following questionable SEO techniques will cause Bing to examine your site more deeply for page-level web spam. If your site is determined to be using web spam techniques, your site could be penalized as a result.
Note that Bing recognizes that the core concepts behind many of these techniques can have valid uses. No one is saying that their use always and automatically denotes web spam. The issue of intent behind their use is the distinguishing factor for determining whether or not web spam is present and any site penalties are needed. Please understand that, from a search engine perspective, the web spam effort consistently provides very little to no value whatsoever to end users. The entire effort is directed to fraudulently affect search engine rankings. As Martha Stewart might say, that's not a good thing.
Keyword URL and link stuffing
Definition: This is the use of heavily repeated keywords and phrases with the goal of attaining a more favorable ranking for those words in a search engine index.
Problem: Keywords can be repeated to excess, so much so that they render any text in which they appear unintelligible from a natural language point of view. Those excessive repetitions can also be added in places that are not seen by the end user (meaning outside of displayed page text). Some web spam pages even use repeated keywords that are unrelated to the theme of the page. If any of these conditions are detected, these techniques will draw the attention of Bing as likely web spam.
What we look for: The purveyors of web spam use a variety of methods for keyword stuffing, including:
- Excessive repetitions of keywords. The number of repetitions relative to the amount of content on the page is a key indicator of web spam. The practice of repetitive keyword stuffing is often relative to the amount of content in a page. For example, a very long page of text dedicated to a single topic may naturally repeat its primary theme keyword several times, but a page with less content using the same number of repetitions of the same word may be indicative of keyword stuffing.
- Stuffing words unrelated to the page or site theme. Stuffing the page with words that are known to be heavily searched on the Web when they are irrelevant to the theme of a site can be an indicator of web spam. Relevance is an important factor for evaluating whether keywords are indicators of web spam.
- Stuffing on-page text. Littering the text of a page with repeated keywords that render the text meaningless and unreadable to humans is a clear problem. When such content on the page is not useful to people, the content is often suspect as web spam.
- Stuffing in less visible areas of the page. Placing repeated keywords in less visible areas of a page, such as at the bottom of the page, in links, in Alt text, and in the title tag, can be indicative of web spam.
- Hiding stuffed keywords in the code of a page. By putting keywords in the code of a page that the search engine crawler (aka a bot) will see but configuring it so that a web browser will not show it to a human reader can be highly suspicious. Such methods as formatting text fonts the same color as the background, using extremely small fonts, and hiding stuffed keywords using tag attributes such as style=”display: none" and class=”hide” (both of which prevent the tagged contents from being shown to the user) will draw the attention of a search engine for closer scrutiny.
Note that stuffing the keywords tag alone is not a reason to be judged as web spam. But tag stuffing could be an indicator that other web spam techniques may be employed and could draw a search engine to take a closer look at such a site.
It is important that webmasters not overreact to this information. A small amount of relevant keyword repetition is considered common and is not considered web spam as long as it is used naturally within the page content language and the page provides useful, relevant content. They key message is always the same: develop your pages for human readers, not for search engine bots, for the best results. For more information on creating and using keywords wisely, see the blog articles The key to picking the right keywords and Put your keywords where the emphasis is.
Misspelling and computer generated words
Definition: Pages populated with many various spellings of targeted keywords, especially those unrelated to the theme of the page or the site, can indicate that the keyword lists are computer generated.
Problem: Aggressive inclusion of large numbers of misspelled or rare word lists and phrases can be considered web spam when used to excess. The relevance of those words to the theme of the page or the site is the key distinguishing factor here.
What we look for: The Bing team commonly sees the following techniques on web spam sites:
- Excessive use of misspelled keywords. Huge lists containing all possible iterations of a misspelled word can be so excessive that the page will be worthy of closer inspection for web spam.
- Large numbers of misspelled words unrelated to the theme of the site. Long lists of word spelling variations whose core definitions are unrelated to the theme of the page or the site can indicate the site is web spam.
- Common misspellings of popular site URLs in domain names. Common misspellings of URLs and other computer-generated content are usually considered web spam sites.
Redirecting and cloaking
Definition: When a web client visits a website, certain traits can be used to identify the user and redirect them to a different page. These include, but are not limited to, redirects based on the referral code, the user agent (bot or human), and IP address.
Problem: Redirecting can be a legitimate technique in some cases such as if a web client is limited in what it can display on a mobile device web browser, or when a web server uses the client's IP address to determine the language in which to present the content (aka geo-targeting). However, problems arise when sites filter their content based on whether the user agent belongs to an end user web browser versus a search engine bot. This type of filtering can run the gamut between showing the bot a keyword-stuffed page to an entirely different set of content, all of which is an attempt to deceive. When used with this intent, this is web spam.
What the webmasters who implement these techniques don't understand is that search engines can detect this attempted deception. We do see when the content presented is user-agent based, and when the differences between the content variations is not done in the same light as that done between mobile and desktop browsers.
What we look for: Some webmasters design their websites to use the following deceptive techniques when the detected user agent is a search engine bot:
- Script-based redirects. The use of JavaScript or tag refreshes to automatically change which page is displayed are often suspicious in nature and will get more scrutiny from Bing. This is because some sites use JavaScript to redirect all visiting user agents to a new page, and that page may contain web spam. However, since search engine bots don't execute JavaScript natively, they won't execute the redirect and thus are supposed to index the contents of the original page (although the search engines bots can still detect this behavior).
- Referral redirects. Some websites consider the referrer when they show a page. When the referrer is a SERP and the target website shows a different page than the one shown when the user directly navigates to the URL, this behavior is considered web spam.
- Redirect search engine bot to a target page. Some sites detect the user agent specified and send search engine bots to alternate, text-based pages modified with other web spam techniques such as keyword stuffing (but the site provides its normal web content pages to end user web browser user agents). When redirects are filtered on search engine user agents for the purpose of deceiving them, this is a web spam version of cloaking. Bots can detect when they are redirected to special pages. So when this is encountered, it is usually indicative of web spam and will be investigated further.
- Redirect end users to a target page. Sometimes webmasters use cloaking to work the opposite way than described immediately above. They may serve highly optimized content pages on Topic A to search engine bot user agents, but when a web browser visits the site, the page shown shows content for a completely different subject (typically an illicit one, such as a page promoting porn, casino or online gambling, illicit pharmaceuticals, and the like.). The effort here is to rank well for a commonly searched topic of interest in a search engine results page (SERP). Then supposedly when searchers find that link in their SERPs, they click the blue link in the SERP and are unwittingly redirected to the web spam page.
The problem for webmasters practicing these techniques is that their technical deceptions are not very effective. Search engines use a number of techniques to uncover such fraudulent practices as redirect and cloaking web spam. When they are revealed, the websites of the perpetrators are penalized, sometimes severely. Well-meaning webmasters or online business owners who hire unscrupulous consultants or carelessly take black hat SEO advice from indiscriminate sources on the Web are setting themselves up for trouble. Reviewing the issues identified in this article as well as the official webmaster guidelines for Bing, Yahoo, and Google, will go a long way to keeping a website on the right track for search.
In the next article on web spam, we'll discuss link-level web spam in detail. We'll also include some information on what to do if your site was pegged as web spam and after the problems have been resolved, how to request reinstatement into the Bing index as a normal website. Stay tuned!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Ranking Feedback and Discussion forum. Until next time…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Just a quick note for today.
While we've been busy working on the new series of web spam blog articles, we were also busy working on updating the recently compiled Webmaster Center FAQ (as described in the blog announcement New Webmaster Center FAQ available) with even more content. While some might call it new and improved, I just claim that it's bigger with more information (hmmm — I guess it is new and improved!).
The Webmaster Center FAQ document now contains 82 detailed questions and answers, organized into 12 categories, all navigable through a linked table of contents. As before, it's available as a downloadable PDF through the Microsoft Download Center. Check it out!
And be sure to keep coming back to the Webmaster Center blog on a regular basis. We have a lot of new and exciting content coming your way soon. You won't want to miss it. Heck, you might even want to subscribe to our blog's RSS feed.
Thanks for tuning in. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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The Bing blogs and forums team are grateful for the growing participation and readership of our user community. We've worked hard over the past year to provide compelling content that will help our users get the most out of the Bing experience. We sincerely hope that our readers and participants continue to find value in the content we produce!
The reader comments left in the Bing blogs and forums have always been governed by our published Code of Conduct policies. Over the past year, we have implemented additional, clarifying policies to help minimize the incidence of irrelevant comment spam in the Bing blog and forums without affecting the ability of our community to contribute to the ongoing conversations. While those policy updates have helped reduce the amount of spam from past levels, we've received enough feedback and requests to persuade us that we need to do a bit more. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate our existing policies on comment spam and introduce some policy updates that we hope will further improve the experience and value our community derives from perusing the user comments we receive.
Starting on May 24th, 2010, the Bing community blogs and forums will observe the following policies on comments:
Our goal is to improve the value of the community by improving the value of the content it contains. We look to minimize the disruption that comment spam introduces into the community. We want to encourage everyone to participate in the Bing community! The things we do not want (and neither do our readers) are unwanted sales pitches, off-topic comments, inappropriate language, or irrelevant backlinks that cloud the environment for this growing community of users.
Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to reading even more of your comments in the Bing community!
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Editor’s note: Wezley, one of the commentors below, asked for some clarifications that I wanted to capture here. Since the big problem with comment spam is with gratuitous and irrelevant backlinks (especially in signatures), follow Wezley's lead by putting your backlinks in your Bing community profile page and leaving them out of your comments. Since your Bing community name is linked to your community profile, any visitor to the blog can visit your profile to find and follow your backlinks (where rel="nofollow" is not used, unlike here in the blog comments). It's a win-win idea for everyone! Thanks, Wezley! –Rick
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In Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web (such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit!), you're ready to start looking at what might be preventing you from ranking where you should be. In this post, we'll look at several possible, on-page issues.
Focus your aim on targeted keywords
Since search engines rank sites based in large part on their relevance to the keywords used in the search query, identifying your site's targeted keywords for each page of content is key for assessing how well they are performing with them.
It’s brainstorming time. If you don't already have any keyword and key phrase lists (really?), develop one for each content page stat. If you already have such lists, challenge your existing assumptions to see if those words and phrases on your lists are still the best keywords for your site. For more information on creating your keyword list, check out our blog post The key to picking the right keywords (SEM 101).
There are many useful keyword research tools available on the Internet (some for free, some not), to help you create and update these important lists. I suggest you consider adding the free keyword development and analysis tool from Microsoft adCenter called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to your website toolbox.
As you develop your site's keyword lists, consider whether it might be fruitful to make a run for the less competitive keywords found in the long tail of search rather than the highly competitive few keywords in your industry that are obvious to everyone (including your competitors). I discuss this concept in detail in the blog article Chasing the long tail with keyword research (SEM 101) (that post also discusses how to use the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool).
Once you have your keyword lists developed, test your assumptions. Open up several browser windows and go to the search engines your users will use (we suggest Bing for starters! . Run queries on those keywords and see where your site falls in the results. Try different combinations of keywords. Each page of your site should use a few of the keywords from your lists, and every keyword in your collection should be used on at least one page (just avoid using every word on every page!). As part of this review process, look to identify unproductive pages or missed keywords.
In your query tests, note how each keyword affects where your site places in the rankings of each search engine. Are you at the top of the list? Are you on the first page of 10 results? If you're not where you want to be, by identifying this problem, you're now on the right track to fixing it.
Site review task: Develop lists of targeted keywords for each page of your site and check your pre-optimization performance for those words. Consider targeting some of the less-often used words in the long tail of search.
Content is coin of the realm
We’ve said it before, and yes, we're saying it again. You need compelling, original content to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). And not just any content, but indexable content. It can't be tied up in scripts or multimedia technologies that the search bots can't read. Feed your favorite bot!
Look for opportunities to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Can you write? Develop articles about your experience. Give lists of recommendations (who doesn't love a relevant Top 10 list?). Are you a photographer? Post you own beautiful images! Are you an artist? Upload samples of your artwork. And don't stop with just yourself – let user-generated content (UGC), found in forums and blogs, help provide useful information to your readers and help drive valuable inbound links to your site, which in turn will contribute to improved site ranking. It becomes a virtuous circle. And that's a good thing.
One key point: Remember those keywords we just spoke of earlier? Those words need to be used in the text of your pages. If you're posting non-text-based, multimedia content, be sure to add keyword-rich meta data to describe it. Searchers will never know what content is on your site if you don't have a reference to it in text form, be it in , , or alt text. For more information on developing the content on your site, see our blog post Are you content with your content? (SEM 101).
The key to developing your content successfully is to target human readers. Rich, informative content written for people is what the search bot looks for and values the most. However, specifically targeting search bots in an effort to artificially improve ranking will likely result in the site being deemed web spam. This can result in penalties that can range from lower placements in the SERPs to outright expulsion from the index. For more information on what sort of content is considered web spam, see our blog articles Eggs, bacon, spam, spam, and spam (SEM 101) and The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam (SEM 101).
Site review task: Check the content on your pages to be sure you use the targeted keywords in the body text. Look for ways to add more original content to your site, including UGC-based pages.
Provide graceful degradation for media content
What if you want to wow those human readers with super-cool animations and videos or help them with beautiful, web-based applications using rich Internet application (RIA) technology like Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash? You can certainly do that, but always remember those folks who cannot keep up. You don't want to leave them high and dry if they cannot, for whatever reason, access Silverlight or Flash content. (This caveat applies to AJAX and JavaScript technologies as well.)
Why should you care about those down-level users? Because search bots are some of the users who cannot reliably access content using these technologies! And if they can't see your super-cool content, what's left for them to see? If the answer is "nothing," that's what will be indexed on your site. And that's probably not what you intended.
Here’s a test: run a web browser with the following conditions:
- Disable automatic loading of images
- Disable JavaScript
- Uninstall Silverlight
- Uninstall Flash
Essentially, make your browser a text-only experience. (Alternatively, use a tool such as SEO-Browser to run this test.) Now visit your website. What do you see? Anything? If not, you have some additional content development work to do. What you need to do is add keyword-rich, text content that is presented as a secondary alternative when the primary, super-cool stuff can't be seen. I covered this concept in depth in the blog post Illuminating the path to SEO for Silverlight.
Site review task: Check your pages employing advanced content presentations to be sure you provide alternative, useful, keyword-rich, text-based (indexable), down-level content.
Heads up on tag content
An important area to examine on every page of your site during your site review is the meta content of the tag, found at the beginning of every HTML page. The tag of every page on your site should always include and description tags.
The content of each tag should be unique and directly relevant to the content on the page. Same for the description tag. And while you're checking, look to see if these tags use some of the targeted keywords for their respective pages (if not, fix that). Bots use the content in these tags to help define the contextual theme of the pages, and thus by definition, the words and phrases used in these tags to describe the pages are identified as keywords for assessing relevance to those pages. If you use generic, boilerplate text (or even no text at all) in these pivotal tags, you are missing a fundamental opportunity to tell the bot what your page is all about.
Not only is the content within these tags considered crucial by bots, they provide significant value to human readers as well. When your site is listed in the SERPs, users will often see the content used in these tags shown in the blue line hyperlink and in the snippet text describing what content your page has to offer. If you've overlooked providing compelling and informative descriptions here, no one will ever know about the cool content you have on your site, and thus no one will click the SERP link to visit your site. What a wasted opportunity! Check out a past blog post on this subject at Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101).
I have some key tips to remember when writing and description tags:
- Use your page's targeted keywords in these tags, but always write the text so it's logically readable by a person.
- At least for search bots, word order matters. Use your most important keywords first.
- Omit the obvious, generic stuff, especially from the beginning of the tags. Instead, write a concise, pertinent description of the content on the page.
- Never stuff these tags as a keyword dump.
Site review task: Check the and description tags of each page to be sure they have unique and targeted keyword content in them.
Using your head(er tags)
Another helpful page element to consider for keyword usage is the header tag used within your content – specifically the
tag. You should have not zero, not two or more, but just one
tag in each content page. The text in that tag should ostensibly serve as the top-of-the-visible-page title (not to be confused with the tag in the page code) declaring the theme of your page's content. Given the tag's prominence in defining the theme of the page for human readers, its text content has SEO value, so use your targeted keywords here as well. You can also use additional, lower-level header tags, such as
and so on, but these tags are less significant in terms of SEO value.
Site review task: Check your content pages to be sure you are using one
tag in the text and that it uses keywords targeted for that page.
nchors away
Just as the
tag helps define the theme of a page to the bot, anchor text helps define the theme of a linked page. When you are cross-linking to other pages on your site, don't waste an opportunity to associate a keyword or two with an entire page! Use keyword-rich descriptive text in your link. Never use meaningless text such as "click here" for anchor text, which conveys nothing about the content of the referenced page.
Site review task: Check your pages to be sure you provide descriptive, keyword-rich text in your anchor (link) text, especially when cross-linking to other pages on your own site.
![]()
is everything (if you include alt text)
Do you include images in your page content? Do you use images to convey important text-based content that you want your visitors to read? (We often see vitally important text information, such as the company name or the business address) offered only within images!) If so, that content may be missed by search bots. They cannot read image content the way we can. To help bots understand what is being shown, always use alt attributes in your ![]()
tags. Using alt attributes enables you to associate your targeted keywords with the content images on your page.
I have a few tips on using images:
- Don’t bother to add alt attribute text to non-content images, such as those that fill space or simply convey color.
- Use descriptive file names (such as corvette.jpg rather than the generic and meaningless image001.jpg) to further convey meaning about the image for the search bot.
- Use the lowest image resolution needed to minimize file size. The goal is to strike a balance between reasonable image quality and page load time.
- For pages that require high-resolution images (especially in large numbers), use linked, low-resolution thumbnails as the default images.
- Never use images as a text replacement for important content you want indexed.
For more information on using images in your site, see the blog post Images and Flash and script, oh my! (SEM 101).
Site review task: Review your pages for the use of images as content to be sure you provide useful, keyword-rich (indexable) text in ![]()
tag alt attribute.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Coming up next: We'll look at some site-wide issues that can prevent your site from ranking well. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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For webmasters who work hard to build and publish their sites, it can be frustrating when their sites are barely indexed and rank poorly across all search engines. They may think, "Why does this happen? What can I do to improve this?"
The reasons for poor ranking are nearly as myriad as the number of sites on the Web. Your site may be competing against some very well established, well-designed sites in your industry niche. Your competitors may have published a ton of useful, expert content, or have implemented a blog or forum where all of your industry's customers go for information, thus earning them tons of valuable visitors and backlinks. And frankly, it could be that those competing sites have seriously invested in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts when you have not. If your page ranking is not where you want it to be, your site may be due for a serious examination, one that looks for problems to solve and uses optimization techniques that are meaningful to both human visitors and search engine bots alike. You may be ready to consider a site review.
A site review is a method of diagnosing issues that may prevent a site from ranking well and/or driving user traffic. It works by looking at both on-page and site-wide factors that may be getting in the way of optimal performance.
While it can be helpful to have a professional consultant conduct a site review for you, with a little background on what to look for, you can perform a basic site review of your own site and develop a response plan for site improvement.
Why review my site?
Doing a site review is the first step in optimizing your site for search. But more importantly, it's also the first step in optimizing your site for users. The same problems that negatively affect search ranking often interfere with the user experience as well, so investing in a site review can make a very big difference in how your site performs for all of your visitors.
For many busy businesses and individuals, time is of the essence when publishing a new site. Corners are often cut, and well-planned optimization is often an early victim of a tight deadline or resource budget. Site improvements, promised after the initial releases are published, are typically iterative and happen as time and resources become available, if done at all (and as you well know, if you depend on the fire-fighting folks in the IT department for your site updates, free time and resources for them are rare commodities). And even then, if you get the opportunity to make improvements, someone first needs to determine what improvements need to be made.
The framework for site reviews isn't mysterious. There are clearly defined patterns of technical errors and oversights all webmasters should look for that can affect how well a site performs with ranking. A site review illuminates those issues for resolution.
A site review can be a way to focus efforts on identifying and prioritizing the improvement tasks that'll bring the biggest bang for the resource investment buck. In other cases, a site that ranks well may still not be performing well for users, or vice versa. The site review process can help identify why this is happening and how to correct it. Lastly, if you are ranking well today, it may be because your competitors have not yet optimized their sites (which could change at any time!). In this case, running a site review to look for ways to further improve your site's performance is an investment in maintaining your position at the top (and perhaps expand your reach into other keyword realms).
Time and resources
One thing to keep in mind about doing SEO work is that it's not an instant fix. Neither is it a one-time job. The optimization changes made to a site often take time to show the full extent of their benefit. And to continue to see benefits, SEO work needs to be done on an ongoing basis. It's important to communicate to your web team and/or your management that they need to reset expectations about level of effort and time needed for SEO work. This is not to say it's not a worthwhile effort to make or to too costly to do. To the contrary, it's an excellent investment if you want your website to be more successful in search and with users. Just be realistic about expectations. Short duration, small resource investments in SEO will usually not yield the results that folks typically want.
Over the next several posts, I'll share with you some problematic issues we here at Bing see as we crawl websites and break down each one so that you can conduct a productive review on your own site. Let's start with where to begin.
Examine site goals
A site review begins by actively thinking about what goals you have for your site. Why do you have a website? What do you want from your site's visitors? What do your visitors want from your site? If you are looking for conversions (where you "convert" a casual visitor into someone who actively buys your product or service, opens a document or media file, or provides their email address to subscribe to a newsletter), look at your site from a new visitor's perspective. Is the site easy to use? Is it easy for users to find the information they seek? Are there any obstacles in place that make conversions unnecessarily hard to complete? Solicit honest, objective feedback from people who have never been to your site or perhaps from customers who are critical. You might be surprised by what you hear. Consider constructive criticism to be an opportunity for improvement.
Site review task: Define the business goals of your website and what you want site visitors to do once there. Then, as a result of the site review process, determine what can be done to facilitate those goals, prioritized so that resource or budget constraints won't prevent you from picking the lowest hanging fruit.
Baseline your site's current performance
While you're soliciting feedback and reviewing site goals, take a baseline measurement of your site's performance today. Think about the performance metrics that you want to know and improve upon, in addition to search engine ranking (which is hard to actively control). If you haven't yet used web analytics, now is the time to start. If you do use them now, run a baseline performance report before any changes are made to the site. Note the metrics important to your business, such as (for example):
- Total visitors per month/week/day
- New vs. returning visitors
- Most viewed pages
- Entry pages
- Exit pages
- Bounce rate
- Click-through paths from entry page to exit page
- Referring domains
- Referring pages
- Referring search engines
- and which keywords and key phrases they typed
- Visitors by country
- For site offering subscriptions to email newsletters: number of sign-ups
- For resource sites: number of downloads
- For e-commerce sites:
- Conversation rate of visitor to purchase
- Drop-off rate during shopping cart experience
- Frequent purchasers vs. infrequent or one-time purchasers
Get a snapshot to see how well your site is performing today. After all, you can't truly improve what you don't measure.
If your site review uncovers issues that need to be changed (and they typically do), you can then document how the changes you made, if done incrementally and methodically, affected the performance of those metrics. Your business manager will appreciate that.
Site review task: Gather pre-optimization web analytics data on site performance.
Get your webmaster tools
To get a better handle on many of the issues that could be preventing your site from ranking as well as it should, one of the first steps should be to register your site with the various webmaster tools and services provided by the major search engines (we naturally suggest you start with the Bing Webmaster Center tools . You'll need to retrieve and then place a custom authentication code on your site to use these tools, but once that's done, you'll get access to detailed information reflecting what the Bing search engine bot found about your site. With these tools in place, you'll be armed and ready to begin identifying the improvements you can make to your site that'll increase the likelihood of better rank scores and, as a result, more user traffic.
As a prelude to the deeper site review issues we're going to discuss going forward, I also suggest installing the Free SEO Toolkit from the Microsoft IIS team. Your site doesn't need to run on IIS Server to use this amazing tool. You only need to use a client computer that can run a local version of IIS 7 or better (such as Windows Vista and Windows 7). For more information on installing and running the SEO Toolkit, see the blog post IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0 hits the streets! (SEM 101).
Site review task: Download and install or register your site to use the many webmaster tools that will assist in your site review and optimization project.
Review the search engine guidelines
There are a whole slew of on-page issues that, if omitted or implemented incorrectly, can adversely affect the ability of search bots to effectively crawl your site and thus hinder your ranking. To see what Bing recommends you do to improve how your site is indexed by our bot, please first review our online Help topic Guidelines for successful indexing.
Once you have reviewed the Bing guidelines, it's time to see what on-page issues there may be on your site that could benefit from optimization. I recommend you use the Free SEO Toolkit discussed in the Site Review Part 1 post to run a report and review your page code to see if any of the issues mentioned going forward affect your pages.
Site review task: Review webmaster guidelines documents from Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Coming up next: We'll look at some of the on-page issues that can hinder your site from reaching its optimum performance. See you soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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Today’s forum thread of note is a discussion around what can be done to optimize image content for SEO. Several members of the Bing Webmaster Center forum community have chimed in with helpful advice.
What do you do on your site to optimize images? What have you found to be most important when adding images to a website? Join in the conversation!
To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out How do we optimize images? Is it necessary to optimize the images? in Webmaster Center's General Questions & Feedback forum. As always, many thanks to everyone who contributed to this forum topic!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. Later…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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We have another interesting conversation thread to highlight today as our latest From the Forums column selection. One of our helpful users in the Bing community posted his list of the top "45 points for SEO." This post has generated a good many forum reader replies – most positive, a few critical, and many contributing their own additional points to the conversation.
What are your top tech tips for SEO? What have you done to improve your site? What's been successful for you? Join in the conversation!
To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out 45 points how to be the best SEO in Webmaster Center's Search Engine Marketing (SEM) forum. Many thanks to all who have contributed to the forum community on this topic!
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Center forums. I've got many more SEM 101 posts and other, more technical blog articles coming your way soon, so stay tuned! See you again soon…
– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
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