How Microsoft Removes "Junk" From Bing Search Results

How Microsoft Removes “Junk” From Bing Search Results

Mar 20, 2012 at 10:25am ET by Barry Schwartz

Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works.

Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and also have they handle junky or empty snippets.

Junk links include:

Dead Links
Soft 404
Parked Domains

Junk or Empty Snippets include:

Junky Snippets
Empty Snippets

Dead link examples are pages that return a 4xx or 5xx error code is returned from an HTTP request for a page. There are times where there is a dead link in Bing and Bing isn’t aware of it because they have not crawled the web page since it returned a proper result. But Bing’s crawler does crawl often and is able to detect dead links fairly quickly. When Bing does detect a dead link, depending on their algorithms they may “boost its re-crawl priority and frequency” to see if the dead link was a temporary error and should return to the search results or not.

A soft 404 is like a hard 404 but without returning a 404 header status. Bing said they use their “high precision classifiers in this area use page content such as key phrases in the page’s title, body and URL to determine if the page is a soft 404 and whether to remove it from the search results.”

Bing doesn’t want parked domains to show up in the search results so they use signatures to identify parked domains and remove them.

Bing also uses various techniques to improve their encoding classifier, document convertor, garbage detector, and HTML parser have reduced the occurrence of junky snippets.

For snippets that are empty, Bing uses dynamic crawlers and document processors, plus a number of classifiers to determine the appropriate snippet for the search result.

For more details, see the Bing blog.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.cloudkeyseo.com/ Eric

We are an SEO company in Orange County and one of our biggest challenges with new clients is making sure we overcome dead link issues when optimizing websites. Good article.
Tatyana Serbit

When Wikipedia and others were on SOPA protest, Google recommended them to use 503 (Service unavailable) header status to not being re-crawled with new “content” and lose positions.
What whould Bing do?
>Dead link examples are pages that return a 4xx or 5xx error code is returned from an HTTP request for a page.
>When Bing does detect a dead link, depending on their algorithms they may “boost its re-crawl priority and frequency”

The key point is that they “may”. Also they may not. Depending on their algorithms. They may just kill the page from SERP and index. Also they may not. ))