Bing highlights ranking factor in webmaster guideline updates

Are you aware of the new changes to Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines? 

Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

The latest update of Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines outlines the factors that Bing uses when evaluating and ranking content and those include:

1. The match of the content and the intent of the search query.
2. How credible the page, author, and site are as well as any online discourse around the content.
3. How engaged the users are. In this case, Bing looks at click through for any specific query to a site from search results, and whether users spent time on the results that they clicked on or if they “pogo sticked” back to the search results. And finally, they look at whether the user adjusted or reformulated their query. 
4. Freshness and whether or not the content is up to date
5. Geo location
6. Page load time (faster is obviously better).

Additionally,  Bing’s limitations around their crawl abilities were also evident in this update – signalled by the use of the word “limit” throughout the document. 

Here are the things that you should “limit”:

• Number of links on any one page
• Dynamic loading resources (AJAX) and JS.
• Number of pages on your website *they didn’t provide a number)

Bing also added elements around image optimization (that mirror Google’s) and the link attributes for sponsored and UGC (that mirror Google’s).

My big takeaway from the changes is that this might be one of the first times that one of the major search engines stated that bounce rate from search is a ranking factor. For years this has been a hot debate in SEO circles. This means that you should look at your Google Analytics/web analytics implementation to see if you can tighten up your tracking to get as much of the data around organic bounce rate as possible and see if you can improve it. 

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