In the post-Panda world, Google is the search engine most commonly associated with automated evaluation of quality. Bing has made it clear that they’re also in for that game, though, and have provided a list of items to avoid if you want to be seen as a quality site.
Bing’s List of Low-Quality Flags
It’s not hard to figure out what to avoid on Bing. After all, they’re telling us outright what signals make their site crawler believe a site is quality. Here’s the quick breakdown of items:
- Long pages or long-winded content. Bing advises webmasters to break longer posts up into multiple pages and to make sure all their content is focused and on-topic.
- Long videos. Bing reminds users that, should there be a transcription on the page, even brief videos can make a page look like it’s overflowing with content. Additionally, long videos “increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load.”
- Duplicate content. Just. Don’t. Do. It.
- Low-value content. Bing advises webmasters to evaluate their page to see how authoritative the page comes off. If it doesn’t seem authoritative, it may well seem thin to the search robot.
- Not using social sharing tools. Bing indicates that not providing sharing options can be damaging.
- Using too much text with no images or too many images with no text.
- Not having appropriately edited, well-constructed content. Spelling, grammatical, punctuation, and linguistic errors are harmful. Bing specifically warns against using translation tools to create your content.
While it’s not assumed that this list is comprehensive, it’s certainly a good place to start when optimizing for Bing and Yahoo.
[Sources include: Bing]
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SEO
