25 Aug BING REVEALS RANKING SIGNALS FOR CONTENT AND WEBPAGES
Bing Reveals Ranking Signals for Content and Webpages
- In the past year, Bing has been quietly working on new webmaster guidelines that reflect its ranking system. They didn’t reveal “their magic sauce”, but they did describe the major areas for ranking: quality & credibility, relevance, freshness, page load time, user engagement, and location.
- What’s interesting is that they seem to count on metrics such as user engagement and authorship, and pogo-sticking, unlike Google that claims that it doesn’t use those metrics as a ranking factor.
- Furthermore, Bing claims that it will demote websites that promote offensive content such as derogatory language, offensive statements, name-calling, and lack of authorship.
Bing’s Ranking Signals
Relevance
This is in relation to how accurately the content found on the landing web page complements the objective of the search query. To this end, Bing also considers matching terms found directly on the landing page, as well as matching terms found in links leading to that particular page. Synonyms and semantic equivalents that share the same meaning are also considered to evenly attribute to relevance.
Credibility and Quality
Credibility and quality are determined by factors such as the website’s reputation, the author’s reputation, the use of citations, the data sources, the references, and so on. For example, an article post with zero references to data sources, no citations, written by an unknown author, will be considered a low-quality article. Also, if the article features offensive content such as name-calling and derogatory language, will be almost certainly demoted by Bing.
Freshness
Whenever applicable Bing will always choose fresh and up-to-date content over content based on old data. However, in some instances a certain content produced years ago is still relevant even nowadays. As the content is relevant and users still find it useful, Bing won’t demote it on account on fresher content.
Loading Time
Slow loading time can easily lead to poor user experience and can deter visitors from your website. Bing doesn’t like that and sees it as a weakness. As a result, it is more likely to get your website demoted as opposed to ranking it high. On the other hand, fast loading pages send all the right signals to Bing.
User Engagement
Bing takes into account how your visitors interact with your website. For example, Bing considers how long visitors spend on your website, through which search query the users found your website, did they had to reformulate their original search query, and so on.
Location
Bing takes note and considers the locations of the user (city and country), the language of the landing page, where the website is hosted, where the internet traffic comes from to the webpage, and so on.
