Bing crawls differently than Google

Did you know that Bing annotates your content before it indexes it?

Hello, thanks for listening to SEO tips today. 

Jason Barnard spent the month of April interviewing Bing reps for Search Engine Journal. The interviews are all pure gold. His first interview focused on how Bing discovers, crawls, extracts and indexes information.

Here are your crib notes:

1. Bing pre-filters before they index. If a page does not seem like it would solve a user’s search query or looks thin – it will never make it into the index.
2. Bing can predict what links are most likely going to take it to useless content. It uses a variety of signals like:
   • URL structure.
   • Length of URL.
   • Number of variables.
   • Inbound link quality.
3. Bing has a heavy focus on reducing crawling, rendering, and indexing of garbage. (This helps them save money).
4. Bing retains every URL in its memory and comes back and re-crawls intermittently even if all links to that URL have been removed. 
5. Bingbot also uses Chromium and is becoming evergreen.
6. Bing annotates the data that they store:
   • They add a rich descriptive layer to the HTML.
   • They label the parts: heading, paragraph, media, table, aside, footer, etc.

If your HTML follows a known system (such as HTML5 or Gutenberg blocks in WordPress), then that labeling will be more accurate, more granular, and more “usable” to the different rich elements.

If your content is more easily understood by Bing, you have a distinct advantage.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.