A good website design, faster speed, and navigation will also contribute towards raising your Bing rankings.
Indexing
Once you have substantial quantity on your site, you must get it indexed by Bing. Here are a few necessary steps to be checked during indexing:
- Crawlability
Bing must be able to find your page on the site before it can index it. Consider an example of WordPress pages where after the creation of a page from your WordPress dashboard, there are no internal or external links to it due to which search engines are unable to find it. You can index your site’s internal pages by uploading an XML sitemap. Also, you must make sure that robots.txt file doesn’t block these pages. A robots.txt file can be used to block Bing from crawling and indexing harmful pages on your site.
- Structure of your website
Your website’s structure is a major factor to consider while setting up your site. It is important for you to invest your time in a design that will provide text-links and improved navigation. The inner pages shouldn’t be too complicated to access from the homepage. It’s easier to impress users and search engines with an authentic site architecture.
If your site still hasn’t been indexed on Bing, it could be due to one of the following reasons:
- Bing has yet to crawl your site.
- Bing is unable to crawl your site.
- No links are pointing to your site.
- Your robots.txt file has been setup incorrectly.
- Your site fails to meet Bing’s quality threshold.
- Your site has been de-indexed due to a penalty.
Bing has published a few helpful articles. They have even cited actual case study examples with intricate details about every update made by them. It is essential for you to be alert about your outbound link profile getting linked to clean sites. Reciprocal linking can also get you in trouble.
Penalties by Bing
You might be unaware, but Bing regularly penalizes the sites that do not follow their webmaster guidelines. Bing Webmaster dashboard displays “BLOCKED” status for blocked sites.
Here are a few tips to follow to avoid getting penalized by Bing:
- Do not upload low-quality, user-generated, or duplicate content on the website.
- Do not try to display a different version of your website’s pages to other search engines than the original one.(Cloaking)
- Do not create spam, hacked, fake, or paid links.
Technical Factors
Earlier, the Google bot used to crawl the first 100k of a given page, but now the amount has changed. Even today, Bing only crawls the first 100k of web pages. This signifies that it is of utmost importance to place your most critical content within that first 100k.
- HTTPS no more a part of Bing ranking factors
Google recently made an announcement that HTTPS will be used as a ranking signal. Whereas, Bing officials announced that HTTPs will not be a ranking factor as of now. As they don’t want to mess rankings based on a factor with no substantial relevance.
- Importance of Site Authority
Bing gives importance to a site’s authority. Having a trusted domain will give your site some priority in Bing’s results. Google also considers it as one of the major ranking factors.
- Act Local
To add your site to Bing Local Listing, here are a few pointers:
-Go to Bing Business Portal-> enter your business name and zipcode-> if your site isn’t listed then add it-> if yes then you must make sure to claim it. After this process, you must complete the details page, your profile, mobile site, and add a few photos. Make sure to review your information.
- Site Speed
Bing prefers websites that load faster. Faster sites also provide a better user experience. Slow load times can be irritating for your users, and due to this, they will simply ignore your site and move on to the next SERP result. Most search engines prefer fast loading pages, but not if critical functionalities are at stake.
- Co-citations / Co-occurrences
Co-citations or co-occurrences signifies the text surrounding a website’s inbound links. In general, naturally gained context links are supposed to be followed by relevant texts more than the artificial ones.
- Internal Links
Creating internal links to your best pages with reference from other pages in your site is very important. They needn’t be an exact match, but you need to make sure that they’re relevant to the linked page. Anchor texts are of high importance as they provide an off-page relevance factor.
- Meta Robots Tag
The tag has multiple usages. To overcome the content duplication issue you can use the following code:
Here the ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ attributes order the user-agent un-index the page and not follow any of the links on the page respectively. It is usually preferred that you ‘noindex’ the pages you don’t want to be indexed by Bing.
At the moment Bing considers:
- Microdata
- Microformats
- RDFa
- Schema.org
- Open Graph
- Backlinks
- Quality vs. Quantity
I’ve observed that Bing is less responsive than Google to large amounts of low-quality links. Google and Bing, both prefer high-quality base links.
- User Engagement
With a strong user engagement, your rankings can literally skyrocket on Bing. You can use ‘pogo-sticking’ for the same. If a large number of users access your site without going back to search results, then it’s a very good sign. Keeping your users happy and engaged is of utmost importance. So, your website must never quickly scare off its visitors with poor content.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is not so different for Bing as compared to Google. Both these search engines highly promote quality content. By optimizing your site on Bing, not only will you address a wider audience and leave your competitors behind, but you’ll also be able to rank well on Yahoo and Bing, as Bing powers Yahoo search. You must implement all of these ranking factors, but you must also remember that you need to optimize your site for the visitor. You can create a user-friendly site that people will use and return. This is something that will help in increasing your rankings on Bing and make your SEO efforts worth it. Google may dominate the search engine market, but it doesn’t mean that online users neglect Bing completely.