The Bing Webmaster Blog announced they have added a new feature to the crawl section named Markup Validator. To access this new feature, login to Bing Webmaster Tools and click on the "Crawl" tab. Then on the right side or bottom left side there is an option to click on "Markup Validator." Duane from Bing said that while not all code validation issues have an impact on your web page from loading or rankings, "having the syntax incorrect can affect our ability to use the data as you intend." The tool scans for: HTML Microdata Microformats RDFa Schema.org Open Graph Her [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools

Search engines have "won a major victory" in their battle against so-called content farms. So says the current issue of New Scientist magazine, in an article that's also available online. New Scientist asked University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie to study 50 search queries that are "known to be a target of content farmers." One example query given is "how to train for a marathon." McCreadie studied those queries in both March and August, and the magazine says "the results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory" against content farms. The results are s [...]

Related Topics: Content Farms | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Panda Update News | Panda Update Winners & Losers | Top News

Holiday deal sites that Bing banned from its search listings just before the busy shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now been allowed to return. They include a site run by the group that created the entire Cyber Monday concept. Banned: Not Your Usual Suspects We reported previously how the sites had gone missing, something Bing described as keeping with long-standing policies against "thin" content but which came out-of-the-blue to some site owners. The banned sites included CyberMonday.com, which is run by Shop.org, the group that created the entire Cyber Monday concep [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Antitrust | Legal: Crawling & Indexing | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Top News

Ironically, the trade group that created the Cyber Monday concept had its own CyberMonday.com site lost in cyberspace this week. Lost, that is, if you tried to use Bing to find it. The site, along with some Black Friday deals sites, have been deliberately dropped from Bing as being too "thin" in content. Bing's Version Of The Google Panda Update If "thin is bad" sounds familiar, that's because Google kicked off this trend earlier this year. The Google Panda Update was a change in how Google ranked web pages, designed to penalize pages deemed to be content-light. Google's change didn't rem [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Antitrust | Google: Panda Update | Legal: Crawling & Indexing | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Top News

If you read this column on a regular basis, you may think that Google is the only game in mobile search. The fact is, SEOs optimize for traffic, and Google is the mobile search market leader, so it is often the focus of our mobile optimization efforts. But it’s not the only game in town. As someone who uses mobile search often, I am more often than not frustrated at the number of sites in the results that make me do extra work pinching and zooming to get the information I need. I’m hoping a mobile search engine can come along that will provide a better user experience than Google. An [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing Mobile | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Mobile Search | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search