Replay: What SEOs need to know about Bing Webmaster Guidelines

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Microsoft released a significant update to its Bing Webmaster Guidelines^[1] last month. To dig into the changes, Search Engine Land contributing editor, Barry Schwartz, spoke Microsoft’s Christi Olson and Fabrice Canal, on Live with Search Engine Land^[2] about what the updates mean for SEOs. Olson and Canal were both directly involved in this latest evolution of the guidelines.

Bing first published its webmaster guidelines in 2012 and it had been a while^[3] since they were updated. In this episode, you’ll learn about the changes to the guidelines and and why Olson, Canal and others involved made them.

Olson and Canal discussed why SEOs should focus on intent versus keywords, what they should focus on in the new guidelines and much more. There is also an entire section in the guidelines on ranking factors—relevancy, quality, freshness, user engagement, page load time and more. Information around the URL submission API, support of rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc”, how Bing indexes JavaScript, the evergreen BingBot^[4] is also covered in the updated guidelines.

Watch the full session above, or jump to certain segments via the timestamps below.

• 00:00^[5] – Introduction
• 01:30^[6] – Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft
• 02:18^[7] – Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager at Bing, Microsoft
• 03:15^[8] – New Bing Webmaster Tools
• 05:45^[9] – Revised Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• 08:40^[10] – The Process For Changing The Webmaster Guidelines
• 11:19^[11] – What Didn’t Make It Into The New Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• 13:30^[12] – What Bing Ranking Factors Are Not
• 17:02^[13] – Focus On Intent vs Keywords
• 20:52^[14] – What SEOs Should Focus on in the Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• 24:22^[15] – How Does Bing Define Relevance
• 29:45^[16] – User Engagement Metrics In Search Rankings
• 33:32^[17] – Does Bing Rank Well In Bing
• 35:59^[18] – Author Reputation Ranking Factor
• 39:28^[19] – Site Reputation Ranking Factor
• 41:28^[20] – Completeness Of Content Ranking Factor
• 43:49^[21] – Transparency of Authorship Ranking Factor
• 45:00^[22] – Negativity as a Ranking Factor
• 47:12^[23] – How Bing Knows Something Is True
• 48:46^[24] – Audience Questions
• 49:44^[25] – Bing Looks At Quality Before Indexing A Page
• 50:57^[26] – Freshness as a Ranking Factor
• 52:56^[27] – Location & Hreflang with Bing; Will Be Improved
• 54:53^[28] – Page Load Time as a Ranking Factor
• 56:16^[29] – Rel Nofollow, Rel UGC & Rel Sponsored At Bing
• 59:13^[30] – Conclusion (edited)

Be sure to subscribe to Search Engine Land’s YouTube channel^[31] to keep up with future Live with Search Engine Land episodes.

Live with Search Engine Land’s weekly meetups are about giving great marketers a platform to inform, support and convene our global community. If you have an idea for a session or would like to join a panel, email kbushman@thirddoormedia.com^[32].

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