Bing's new content quality guidelines

[HunkyLuke]

Bing released a new post on its blog this week discussing content quality and providing some firm guidelines that will help webmasters get better rankings in its search engine technology. Don't forget, Bing now only powers the Bing search engine itself, but its also the backend to Yahoo, making it an important player in the search engine market.

Here are some other things to avoid when producing content:

Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appears in other places. Produce your own unique content.
Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.

The rest of Bing’s advice basically boils down to focusing on creating a good user experience and letting Bing know about your content. “Whether you call them rich snippets or by their proper names, the act of marking up your content to tell the engines more details about the content is a wise investment,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. ”By following the plan outlined at Schema.org, you can embed meta tags around your content. Visitors won’t see them, but the search engines will, enabling us to understand your content and use it in unique ways to create more engaging search experiences. Take some time and review this idea to see if you can leverage the great content you’re creating in new ways.”

I recommend you read the full article at http://www.bing.com/community/site_b...y-content.aspx

[tommy5tone]

I just can't get into Bing, that being said years ago I would never use Google because it was too simple and now it's my homepage.

[HunkyLuke]

I don't use bing either, but a lot of others do (especially i.e. users whose default is bing) plus it powers yahoo, so it commands a large search engine presence which makes it worth focusing seo efforts!