| Search Engine Optimisation – Bing Top 5 dislikes!
This week I want to talk to you about the things that Bing doesn’t like. There are loads and loads perhaps millions of articles out there informing people of things that Bing would like you to do. Some based in fact, others complete fantasy. But what these articles neglect are the things that Bing really doesn’t like. Things that will get your site demoted in the search engine results or even deindexed.
So here are the top 5 things that Bing dislikes (a lot)
1) Invalid code. Bing is really specific on invalid code and things that it calls ‘violations’. Some of these violations to the mere mortal seem idiotic – such as twitter feeds or any url that you are linking to that redirects to another page or site. The redirecting one irritates me the most as webdevelopers have no control to what happens on sites that they do not administer – so that means that web developers will need to constantly check that external sites they are linking to have kept the page where they thought it was.
So obviously the next move would be to not link to external links yes? But no, rather than Googles approach of backlinking (where if a lot of sites link to you, you must be a reputable site) BING does the exact opposite and looks at who you link to. They dont use backlinks as a factor to determine ranking at all - which is why this is missing from the Bing webmaster tools. So you have to link to external sites, and key an eye on where that link is pointing to. Not very friendly for the webmaster huh.
2) Branding in the url – Bing prefers keywords
3) Branding in headings – Bing prefers keywords
4) Duplicate content – this is not specific to Bing, but Bing is pretty ruthless on this one. Do not create more than one site with the same content or both will be dropped. Google is pretty smart these days and demotes everything (sometimes deindexes) but the original. Bing will drop you like a hot potato. However, it gets worse. Bing will also demote you if your site can be accessed by typing in www.site.com or site.com (without the www) its considered as two sites BUT Bing will also demote you if your site can be accessed with index.html and without typing that. So you’ll need to make sure that all of this is locked down using htaccess or similar.
5) Widgets! Yes can you believe it widgets. Some widgets redirect – as already mentioned Bing doesn’t like that BUT basically Bing considers most widgets to be ‘violations’ because they contain scripts to make them work. This really is something that Bing needs to get their act together on as sites without this social interactivity are boring and considered old fashioned. But in the meantime, don’t overuse widgets as it will increase the number of ‘violations’ on your site.
So that’s it. Your top 5 Bing dislikes. Please see my other article on the top 5 things that Bing does like!
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