Bing Ranking insights
Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Izzi Smith @izzionfire recently interviewed Fabrice Cancel of the Bing Crawling and Indexing Team and I wanted to share the tidbits that they picked up during the interview.
- Click-through rate (CTR) can be used to determine relevance for a query (if a query is perceived to require clicks for satisfaction) and therefore will affect rankings.
- Featured Snippet satisfaction can be measured by how it reduces a SERP’s CTR. As an SEO I agree with Izzi that if you work hard to get clicks from YOUR Featured Snippet, which would drop the CTR on that SERP might increase your chances of losing that Featured Snippet slot).
- Links matter less for Bing than they do for other search engines
- Bing is aiming to assist a shift in how webmasters get new/updated content crawled and indexed. Rather than crawling the web to discover changed content (which can be very inefficient), they wish to rely more on their easy-to-use indexing API. In fact, I covered how limited Bing’s crawling is in my post on optimizing for Bing’s voice search.
- When it comes to proving that deleted/broken/old content should be removed from the index, for Bing, the process is sped up by simply 301’ing those URLs to the homepage, rather than providing a 404/410. Bing also has a Content Removal Tool.
So those are your tips for today — measure your SERP click-through rate (especially for images and videos), make it easier for Bing to discover your content, and read more on my blog about how Bing is different from Google in relation to discovery, indexing, and ranking.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous episode: 411 on Google Analytics 4
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Hello. I have followed all the advice suggested in this excellent article, but still no luck! Bing is not indexing my website. The site has been online for 6 months and I have already written to Bing support twice without ever receiving any response.
What can I do now?
Your website is probably not of high enough quality for them to index. For Google, new sites are suppressed in ranking for six months in what’s called the “Sandbox”. I assume you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account and have uploaded your XML sitemap? Your design could use some help. It’s not ADA-friendly. Check out this resource: http://web-accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org/design/color/, and I would make sure that you’ve met the transparency guidelines that Google mentions here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content. Here’s Bing’s version of the same: https://blogs.bing.com/search-quality-insights/December-2014/The-Role-of-Content-Quality-in-Bing-Ranking