Bing has advised webmasters that the quality and relevance of content is of the utmost importance and that it will not index pages that are considered to be spammy, malicious or broken.
After updating its Webmaster Guidelines earlier in the summer, Bing’s Christi Olson has provided a summary of items that the search engine does not want to index as it focuses on serving relevant and fresh content to searchers.
In an interview this week, Olson confirmed that Bing does not index everything it comes across and that content needs to meet a certain threshold of quality to make the cut.
Those optimising for SEO with Bing in mind should take heed of the following red flags.
Bing will go out of its way not to index any pages that are classed as ‘junk’, which includes those that are empty, broken, spammy or malicious.
Any pages that have JavaScript errors and issues will not make the grade either.
Olson then referenced the final section of Bing’s updated Webmaster Guidelines for specific actions that brands should steer clear of if they want to achieve better rankings in SERPs.
The list of ‘things to avoid’ includes duplicate, scraped and automatically generated content.
Any form of link buying or link schemes are not looked favourably on either.
The act of ‘cloaking’, which is defined as an SEO method that essentially dupes a search engine into believing that the content on a page is relevant when it is actually different from what users see, is another red flag for Bing.
Other poor practices include the use of misleading structured data markup, keyword stuffing or irrelevant keywords, social media schema, and any affiliate programs that don’t offer value.
“So when sites have substantial amounts of the things to avoid, they could potentially get demoted or not indexed,” Olson concluded.
