A recent interview of Duane Forrester by Eric Enge highlighted several interesting tidbits of how Bing ranks websites and pages in it’s search results. Considering Duane’s position at Bing as the Sr. Product Manager for their webmaster outreach program, these announcements about how to rank your website in Bing search results should be taken seriously.
We have taken a handful of the most interesting responses from Duane & highlighted them here, along with your comments and suggestions on how these may apply to your website.
Deliver on User Experience
“…when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality.”
“The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher. “
Throughout Duane’s responses in the interview, he referenced several times how Bing uses click-thru-rate (CTR) and user experience on a webpage to help judge whether or not it should be promoted or demoted in the search results.
What you should take from these comments is that it is very important to make good landing pages for the visitors to interact with. A high bounce rate on a given page could provide a reason for Bing to devalue your listing.
Improve Bing Spidering & Discovery Using RSS Feeds
“…things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content…”
“Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap… If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”
This isn’t necessarily news, but it does reiterate the need to use valid XML sitemaps and RSS feeds. Bing “likes” these and will continue to utilize them in an effort to streamline the content discovery processes. Btw, “dirt” is defined as errors or broken links that you reference in the RSS feeds. Make sure you update your feeds on a regular basis and ensure that they are error-free.
Page Load Times Not a Factor
“Bing does not use page performance as a ranking factor.”
This is a straight quote from the interview, but could still be a little less than “absolute” in some senses. He states that Bing is about providing the right answer as quickly as possible in another interview question so their is certainly some aspect of page performance (load time) that is factored in – all other factors being equal.
I would generally passover this comment and ensure your website loads quickly; after-all, you’d hate to lose your Google rankings because you followed Bing’s loose suggestion.
Influence of Social Media on Bing Rankings
Eric Enge: “Social media has become an important input to search.”
Duane Forrester: “Yes, in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order. Think of it as a three-piece pie. At some point, social could be more important than content, but that assumes you have excellent content in place.”
I’m not sure it gets much more straight-forward than this response from Duane – social media influence is crucial to your performance in Bing. This is perhaps the most important takeaway from the interview.
What you should take from this… As part of your search engine optimization strategies, get your site into the most popular social media channels. You can accomplish this by adding readily available social sharing tools (e.g. Facebook Like & Share buttons, Tweet this, Google+ and other popular networks). Encourage users to share your site on their favorite network.
Contact Us for Help Improving Your Bing Rankings
MorePro Marketing can help you improve your Bing rankings via our link building, social media marketing and on-site optimization strategies. Our team will ensure that all current best-practices for Bing are being followed & utilized to help improve your search engine rankings, drive traffic and ultimately increase your sales/leads.
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