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

Here is what the results can look like:

Related Stories:

• Bing Webmaster Tools Expand Crawl Details, Offers URL Normalization Tips & More
• Bing Webmaster Tools Integrates Yahoo Traffic Data
• Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools Enables HTML5 Interface
• 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers

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 striking. In the case of the marathon query, sites that contained lists of generic tips, such as “invest in a good pair of running shoes”, were present in the top 10 in March but had disappeared by August, while high-quality sources, such as Runner’s World magazine, now appear near the top. Similar trends were found throughout the 50 queries.

The article doesn’t offer much more in the way of details, unfortunately.

Although the study looked at both major search engines, it’s Google that’s been waging the content farm battle much more actively than Bing. That dates back to the initial launch of the Panda update on February 24th of this year. Read the stories below for more background.

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 concept.

Also banned were BlackFriday2011.com and CyberMonday2011.com, which provided content to Yahoo Deals. Yahoo is one of Bing’s strategic partners. The Yahoo site itself, ironically, wasn’t banned.

Several of these sites had top listings were not deemed to be spam by Google, which has been on a campaign to remove content not deemed to have enough substance to it. Indeed, some of them had top listings with Google.

Now, despite being deemed to thin, several of these sites have returned to Bing. CyberMonday.com is back, as is BlackFriday2011.com. CyberMonday2011.com remains banned.

Algorithm Now Deems Them No Longer Questionable

Why the change? Bing sent this statement:

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are notorious times for spammers, and during this time Bing’s spam classification algorithm picked up this spam pattern and heightened its criteria.

Bing took proactive action to protect our users by removing questionable domains.

In an effort to protect our users some questionable domains may have been demoted or removed that some may consider legitimate sites.

We have since revised our algorithm which has led to some previously blocked sites returning to the index.

Really An Algorithm Change?

A search engine’s algorithm, an automated computer process, is like a recipe that measures many different factors to determine what content should rank well, as well as what to ban (watch our video here about this).

This algorithm change at Bing didn’t seem to weigh many factors. Instead, the change simply seemed to be that Bing banned any site that had the words “black friday” or “cyber monday” in their domain name, rather than an analysis of the content itself, to decide if it was too “thin” to retain.

Bing, however, did reconfirm to us that an algorithm was involved.

Bing Denies Favoring Itself

Several of those dropped have wondered if it was all part of an attempt by Bing simply to drive more traffic to a special section of Bing Shopping that was ranking (and still does) in the first page of listing for searches at Bing for black friday and cyber monday, like this:

Bing denied the move was designed to help itself:

Bing did not replace algorithmic results with its own sites.

Since its inception Bing has offered verticalized content like shopping and travel if it helps address a user’s intent.

These Instant Answers are available for a variety of topics and scenarios, such as shopping, checking stock prices, or stats for athletes.

More Information

For more background on the removals, including how it might help Google with accusations that it has banned shopping sites simply to help itself, see our past articles below:

• Bing Bans Holiday Deals Sites, Including One By Group That Created Cyber Monday
• Holiday Deals Sites Confirm: Bing Dropped Them Just Before Black Friday & Cyber Monday

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 remove web pages. It just meant that pages deemed thin had less chance of ranking well.

In contrast, Bing’s change is more dramatic. It has completely removed some sites deemed thin from its search engine.

CyberMonday.com: Loved By Google, Banned By Bing

Consider the case of CyberMonday.com. The site is run by Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation. Microsoft — which owns Bing — is one of the Shop.org member companies, along with many other major brands.

Shop.org coined the term Cyber Monday in November 2005, as even covered by BusinessWeek by then. The following year, Shop.org created the CyberMonday.com web site to go along with the campaign.

On Google, CyberMonday.com currently ranks in the top results for a search on cyber monday:

On Bing, it doesn’t rank in the top results. Noteworthy, Bing’s own special page to promote Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals available through Bing Shopping gets top billing:

Bing Kills Thin Sites, Doesn’t Just Bury Them

CyberMonday.com doesn’t rank because it has no pages listed within Bing at all:

CyberMonday.com isn’t the only site impacted this way. A number of Black Friday-oriented sites have also gone missing, including:

• blackfriday.info
• theblackfriday.com
• black-friday.net
• 2011blackfridayads.com
• blackfriday.com
• blackfriday2011.com

Bing: Dropping Thin Sites Isn’t New

Why were they dropped? Bing told me:

One of our main goals at Bing is to deliver quality results for our users. Consistent with our guidance to site owners, websites that seem to rely mostly on affiliate content or that offer only thin content often don’t deliver the value searchers are looking for and may be demoted or removed from our index. This is something we continually refine and look at closely throughout the year.

Is this new? Does it impact more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday sites? I was told:

It’s nothing new, and follows guidance we’ve given on our webmaster site. We don’t have any specifics to share.

But It Sure Feels New

Despite what Bing says, this sure feels new. Bing’s statement says this is all consistent with its guidelines, with the link it emailed as part of that statement supposedly pointing to that guidance. But I found nothing there that gave the impression this was a long-standing policy.

The link leads to the Bing Webmaster Center blog, not to its publisher guidelines. Going through the posts myself, looking for any news that thin content gets you banned, the best I could find was this post in August that said:

The worst approach leaves you to seem “thin” in your approach.  This essentially means you aren’t really providing content of value.  An example of this would be a website aggregating content from multiple sources on one page.  Such an approach amounts to little more than a links page related to the query entered.

Thin’s not good, clearly, but that article doesn’t say that thin pages will be banned.

Heading over to actual publisher guidance area, the Guidelines For Successful Indexing doesn’t list thin content as a reason a site might be removed from Bing. Neither does the page about requesting reinclusion.

Instead, I had to go over to another section at Bing designed for searchers — not for publishers — to find this definition of spam that seems to include thin pages as something that might be removed:

Some pages captured in our index turn out to be pages of little or no value to users and may also have characteristics that artificially manipulate the way search and advertising systems work in order to distort their relevance relative to pages that offer more relevant information. Some of these pages include only advertisements and/or links to other websites that contain mostly ads, and no or only superficial content relevant to the subject of the search. To improve the search experience for consumers and deliver more relevant content, we might remove such pages from the index altogether, or adjust our algorithms to prioritize more useful and relevant pages in result sets.

I’m not sure how long this has been there; it’s certainly not in an area publishers would easily spot. It doesn’t seem to guarantee that sites that are thin will be completely blown out of Bing, in the way that these sites have been.

And Feels Targeted To Holiday Deal Sites

Despite what Bing says, this change does seem new — and specifically aimed at sites featuring holiday shopping deal offers.

The person who tipped us to these missing sites last week certainly thought this was a recent change (with the Thanksgiving break, it took until now to get a statement back from Bing).

Over at WebmasterWorld, Rob Woods noted the same in a discussion:

Bing just nuked all but one of the top black friday ad sites from the index. Not just penalized but completely removed all the top ranking domains entirely (except one).

Bing also just nuked any site with “Cyber Monday” in the URL including the .com which is the official site of the National Retail Federation which created Cyber Monday in the first place. Having launched their own black friday / cyber monday affiliate site it looks like they are trying to eliminate any competition from the SERPs. Virtually any site with either keyword in the domain has been completely removed from Bing’s index.

And Is The Opposite Of What Bing Said About Panda

Another oddity is that earlier this year, when asked about Google’s Panda effort, Bing suggested that it wasn’t relevant for Google to be applying sitewide penalties. In an interview with Eric Enge, Bing Director Stefan Weitz said:

Google’s Panda Update was an interesting event. I saw reports recently on DemandMedia showing they were down 40% on their traffic. What this speaks to is the necessity to look at page level quality. I think one of the things that started the work on Panda was the JC Penney paid link issue which called into question the quality of PageRank.

Google initially responded by blocking the entire JC Penney domain for a few days. We thought that hurt the users because we did the same thing in a test. We blocked all JC Penney internally and asked our human ranking systems “does this result for the search phrase “comforters” look better or worse after this change?” Everyone said it looked worse because they expected to see JC Penney there.

What it told us was there are different ways to classify quality of pages. We have page level classifiers that look at every page we index that attempt to discern a quality score. It looks at things like reading levels, number of ads versus content, length of words, length of page, all those standard things, and some not so standard things as well.

In short, Bing believes it’s important that each page be individually assessed for its relevancy and further says it has the technology to do this. However, in the case of these sites, none of this is happening. They were just completely wiped out.

Are These Sites That Bad?

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Bing should keep crappy sites in its search engine. It’s just pretty strange to discover that the site run by the group that started the whole Cyber Monday idea was among those to get the axe, a group supported by Microsoft itself, a site that includes the Microsoft Store among the listings.

Sure, the Blekko search engine that’s been campaigning against thin content doesn’t list any pages from it, either. But Google – which also has guidelines against thin content — deems it worthy of a top ranking.

Similarly, these three sites are all deemed good enough the top results for black friday on Google:

The same sites are completely banned by Bing. They have no pages at all listed, and so they certainly don’t rank for black friday:

Those two arrows? One points to the aforementioned page run by Bing itself offering Cyber Monday and Black Friday specials through Bing Shopping.

The other one, higher up, highlights how BFAds.net managed to survive the culling, even though I’m hard pressed to see the difference between this post on that site versus what Cyber Monday’s home page offered.

Can you spot the difference?

BFAds.net is on the left; CyberMonday.com is on the right.

Thin Is Bad; Thinner Than Thin For Yahoo Is OK?

In another inconsistency, consider this search for black friday ads at Bing:

The arrow points to a page at Yahoo Deals with Black Friday ads:

See those ads that the arrow points to? Those come from BlackFriday2011.com. Click on any of them, and you go to a page at that site — which itself is banned by Bing.

Now that’s irony. BlackFriday2011.com is deemed to thin for Bing, but a page that points to all that thin content? That’s apparently thick enough to keep.

Blowback On The Antitrust Front

Google is one company that will getting a nice holiday bump from the removals. Google has been under fire that it manipulates its results to promoting its own content and keep competitors out.

Microsoft has been one of the companies funding efforts to fight Google on this front, such as through FairSearch. But now, Bing appears to be doing exactly what Google’s accused of. Sites have been dropped that potentially compete with the special Bing Shopping page that’s ranking well.

Like Google, Bing has a dedicated shopping search engine. Like Google, searchers are automatically suggested to use this for relevant queries, such as this unit that’s inserted into a search for digital cameras, showing shopping results:

In contrast, this unit for the special Bing holiday shopping page isn’t showing shopping results:

Instead, it’s designed to drive people to a particular page in the shopping area. It also carries a special tracking code. Both things are unusual, red flags that this is something being done to promote Bing above and beyond what its regular relevancy algorithms would do.

As for the removals, Foundem — another member of FairSearch — has lead the charges that it and others have been banned from Google not for quality issues but instead for anti-competitive reasons.

Google’s Panda Update, Foundem recently argued in a white paper (PDF), was just a continuation of this process:

Panda marks a significant escalation in Google’s undeclared war on its vertical-search rivals. So far, few have made a connection between Panda and the various antitrust Investigations into Google. But Panda isn’t just relevant to these investigations; it is central to them.  Despite being widely touted as an attack on content-farms—which are almost the polar opposite of vertical search services—Panda also marks an aggressive escalation of Google’s vertical-search targeted, “lack of original content” penalties….

With Panda, Google is now targeting many established vertical search brands, as well as emerging ones. Still mindful that it cannot openly penalise well-known competitors, Panda’s algorithmic demotions are more subtle than their predecessors: although affected sites do not completely disappear from Google’s search results, they are systematically demoted to a point beyond the reach of most users, and so receive little or no traffic from this vital channel.

If Google’s Panda Update is bad for merely demoting sites for lacking original content, it’s hard to see how Bing completely removing sites for exactly the same reason is going to help those arguing this aspect of the antitrust investigations against Google.

Postscript: I’m waiting to hear back from Shop.org. They’re checking on the situation, having heard about it only today, apparently after this article appeared. My guess is that they didn’t even notice they were dropped from Bing, probably because Google sends so much traffic to them that not being in Bing didn’t register.

Postscript 2: See our follow-up post at Marketing Land, Holiday Deals Sites Confirm: Bing Dropped Them Just Before Black Friday & Cyber Monday.

Postscript 3: See our further follow-up story, Banned Holiday Deal Sites Return To Bing.

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. And I’m sorry Google, but with the amount of slow-loading, tiny-text, irrelevant-to-my-context desktop sites you present in mobile results, I can’t imagine that such an undertaking would be impossible to do.

Enter Bing. Honestly, I don’t know if Bing has the stuff to take on Google in the mobile search arena, but I applaud them for trying.

I wanted to know more about Bing Mobile and its approach to mobile search, so I asked Bing Mobile and Local Director of Product Management Andy Chu. What follows is his response.

Q. Google is the current mobile search market leader, with what some would say approaches 99% of the mobile search market share. Is that accurate? If it is, why should marketers optimize for and buy media on Bing?

Chu: At Bing, we are focusing on how to help people to make faster, more informed local decisions in order to help them complete tasks, save money and make search more social with their Facebook friends. From a distribution standpoint, Bing is one of the search options on the iPhone and was one of the top 10 free apps in the Appstore in 2010.

Bing is the default search engine for a number of Android, RIM and Brew devices on Verizon, as well as the default search engine on a number of RIM devices from other carriers. With the launch of Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5, Bing is the default search option everywhere Windows Phone ships in the U.S.

Our unique user growth on m.bing.com on Android has grown more than 270 percent — and more than 100 percent on iPhone — over a six-month period ended April 2011. To date, our app activations in the U.S. have exceed more than 22 million.

Furthermore, we know search has evolved beyond simply typing text and navigating to third-party sites via blue links. Input options have expanded to include voice and OCR, and “signals” have expanded to include coordinates, importance, social signals and other factors that help deliver answers and decisions.

These expanded input options help Bing for Mobile better understand user intent, context, location, etc., which in turn allows Bing to provide improved answers, help with decisions and even recommend additional things to do after you’ve completed the immediate task at hand.

We are driving towards a mobile service where Bing will be the must-have mobile companion service that delivers exactly what you need — whether that is a quick answer to a simple fact, or the right tool and guidance to accomplish even a series of complex tasks.

In terms of where marketers should buy media, recent adCenter investments are making more use of mobile signals to drive greater performance for mobile advertising campaigns on Bing. Over the coming months, marketers can expect to see more focus on mobile in adCenter.

Taking each of these investments — the improvements in the Bing mobile experience, distribution across Apple, Android, Windows Phone, mobile investments in adCenter and the greater scale of the Search Alliance — Bing represents a unique, growing audience that mobile marketers can’t reach anywhere else.

Q.  How does Bing plan to distinguish itself in order to gain market share from Google in mobile search?

Chu: Mobile is an important space for Bing, and mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop Internet did. The mobile search category has grown 90% year-over-year according to a June 2010 Comscore report. Additionally, global mobile Internet users are expected to exceed the desktop in four years, reaching 1.6 billion users.

To meet the needs of the market, we’re constantly testing and updating our applications and mobile browse experience.

As previously mentioned, Bing is currently one of the search options on the iPhone and the default search engine for a number of Android, RIM and Brew devices, and the default search option for all Windows Phone devices in the U.S.

Q.  Do you recommend creating mobile websites in order to get more qualified traffic from Bing mobile search?

Chu: Yes, we encourage companies to create a mobile-specific site to optimize the small form factor mobile device experience for consumers.

Q.  Why isn’t mobility more of a quality signal in Bing mobile search results? If you’re trying to provide a positive user experience, why not provide results that are device-specific and contextually relevant?

Chu: Mobile search results will vary depending on device capability and the level of integration we can do at the device and app store level.

For example, in Windows Phone 7.5, we integrated app answers as part of search results to help people discover apps more easily and developed a feature called “Local Scout From Bing,” which takes into consideration a person’s location and specific local interests to help them find things like restaurants and activities in their immediate vicinity.

Q.  Do you see a high bounce rate from mobile searchers arriving at desktop content in search results, or do the majority of the searchers take the time to pinch and zoom to find the answers they need?

Chu: Mobile tasks are completed much faster than PCs, with 70 percent of mobile tasks being completed within one hour. On the PC, it can take up to a month.

Q.  What percentage of mobile search has local intent?

Chu: More than 50 percent of mobile queries have local intent, and 46 percent of those queries are info-tainment related.

Q.  Does Bing consider tablets to be mobile devices?

Chu: We’re paying close attention to how consumers use tablets and other advanced devices, as consumer behavior on these devices is evolving quickly. Today, we consider tablets to be part of our multi-platform mobile strategy. We provide both browser- and client-based solutions that are built to work on a variety of mobile devices such as Windows Phones, BlackBerry, Sidekick, the iPhone, Android, and the iPad.

We design our applications and experiences to be optimized for specific devices, whether that’s tablets, iPhones, Androids, etc. For example, we recently launched a feature called Lasso on our Bing for iPad app that was designed with touch-interface in mind and allows people to search with the circle of a finger.

Q.  Should marketers create separate sites that are tablet-optimized?

Chu: Consumers are using tablets at times and places in ways that are different than they use PCs. As marketers look to the audiences they want to reach, they should consider whether or not a tablet-optimized site can deliver the results that they want before making that decision.

Q.  Apps are popular ways of delivering a mobile user experience, but they often aren’t indexed as mobile web sites are, and aren’t able to be returned in mobile search. Google and Yahoo have tried to solve this problem by returning mobile apps for certain queries.

How does Bing plan to provide an accurate view of the best of the mobile user experience when a lot of it isn’t able to be spidered?

Chu: When using our iPhone app or m.bing.com on your iPhone, Bing offers “app search,” which surfaces a list of available iPhone apps that relate to the search, in addition to normal search results. We also offer a build-in app search capability as part of the Bing on Windows Phone 7.5 experience. Neither Apple nor Android devices currently offer built-in app search capability.

Q.   The keyword suggestions in Bing mobile search appear to be actual mobile queries, as they contain queries like mocospace and ringtones that don’t show up in desktop search suggest. Is this accurate?

Chu: Yes, Bing for Mobile automatically surfaces popular searches suggested based on what’s currently hot on Bing for Mobile. We offer the same experience, called “Popular now,” on the PC.

Figure 1. Search suggest on m.bing.com shows popular mobile queries that could be used for mobile-specific keyword research

Q.   I saw Steve Ballmer at SMX West 2010, and he said, “Mobile queries are just gonna keep going up and up and up. I don’t think we’ll see a drop in queries from PCs, but we’ll see a rise in mobile devices queries. Exact numbers are hard to predict. Some queries will feel similar between the two, but there’ll also be a whole new class of queries that are specific to mobile.”

Is this still accurate as we approach 2012? What would be examples of this whole new class of queries that are specific to mobile?

Chu: Yes, we continue to see mobile queries rise across the board (Android, iPhone, RIM, Windows Phone), and we recognize the importance of identifying the signals, context and location of mobile search queries in order to offer the best search experience.

We’re working to expand the search box to take new signals into consideration to help people do, not just find, on the go.

People are using new signals — like Voice and Camera features on their devices — to start searches and complete tasks, such as identifying songs by using the mobile microphone. These are just a few examples of a new class of queries that are specific to mobile devices.

Q.   What are the most important things that marketers can do to optimize their content for Bing mobile search results?

Chu: For a marketer promoting a web destination, the best way is to use the webmaster tools on Bing.com. Many content developers submit a mobile URL through the webmaster tools, while others find it’s best to have their site detect what type of device is visiting [i.e., tablet, advanced smartphone, PC], and then redirect the end user to an optimized page. Both of these practices work well with Bing.

For marketers promoting a business with a local physical presence, two of the best basic SEO practices for businesses to follow are:

1. Ensure that you are listed in Bing Business Portal and that all business info is correct and always up-to-date
2. Provide superior service and encourage customers to give them good ratings and comments in popular review sites such as Yelp, Urbanspoon and City Search.

Thank you to Andy Chu and the Bing Mobile team for taking the time to talk to me about mobile search and SEO. Bing’s support of webmasters is well-known in the webmaster community, and nowhere is that support needed more than in the relatively nascent field of mobile search, where standards are young and the rules are still being written. It is appreciated.

And Google, whenever you’re ready to talk … we’re listening.

Meta Keywords Tag 101

If you want the history of the meta keywords tag, how it emerged, how it declined, how to use it if you stupidly decide you still want to, see my detailed post from the past, Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines.

Surprise! Bing Says Meta Keywords Is A Signal

But really, don’t use it. You don’t need it. Google doesn’t support it. As for Bing, let me clear up the confusion here. In July, out on WebmasterWorld, Duane Forrester, senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach, provided this advice about the tag:

I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze.

Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.

That was a big change, big news, since until that point, Microsoft hadn’t said that its search engine made any use of the meta keywords tag since the days of having run its own crawler. We’re talking back even before Bing, when the search engine was known as Microsoft Live Search.

I didn’t hear about this, and I gather it got by others, as well. A month later, WebmasterWorld featured it, which got Search Engine Roundtable to notice. I think I was on vacation that week, so I’m not feeling so bad! But Search Engine Roundtable featured it again this week, in a poll where nearly 50% said they now will use the tag.

All Those Damn Questions!

That I noticed. Painfully so. Because if Bing is using the meta keywords tag, that brings back all those questions I hate, like:

• What’s the right format?
• Do you need to have commas?
• Do you need to have a space after the comma?
• Is too much repetition going to help or hurt you?
• What is the maximum length?
• What if you go too long, will that hurt you?
• What if you think it was done wrong and you want to report that it’s all fixed?

A Spam Signal

I contacted Forrester to ask if it was true, and to see what further answers he could provide. After some back and forth, it seemed clear to me that Bing is looking at the tag as a spam signal, not a ranking signal. As I summarized to him in my email:

It sounds like you’re saying that you see a high correlation between crummy pages and people who use the meta keywords tag with garbage – that it’s a spam signal, not a ranking signal.

If that’s the case, then I’d still advise people that you don’t use it for ranking purposes (which solves all those really annoying questions above) but you might use it as a spam signal and that people simply shouldn’t use it.

And his response was:

Yeah, you’re pretty much bang on Danny. In fact, it’s not like we’re actively trying to encourage folks to start using the tag. And you’re right – the scenario I describe is more of a spam signal, which ultimately leads to rankings (or not, as the case may be).

So use the tag? Sure, if you want to take a chance that by overstuffing it, you’ll cause Bing to think you’re spamming. Be safe, be smart, save your time. Don’t use it.

What if you already have it on your page? Many pages do. And I wouldn’t panic, if you do. I suspect it’s seen as a spam signal more heavily if there are other spam signals present.

Postscript: After this posted, Forrester sent me this further comment about if you already use the tag:

The main thing people need to keep in mind if they decide to use the tag is to follow the known best practices. Ultimately, it’s the overt keyword stuffing that gets noticed and makes us want to look a little closer. If you’re willing to stuff pointless keywords into the meta keywords tag, what else might you be inclined to do?

So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. You should see your impressions and clicks data spike up, while the click through rate numbers may fluctuate from the norm as well. Since Bing now fully powering Yahoo search’s organic results, virtually in most geographic locations now, Bing has decided to integrate their data in the tool.

There are many webmasters who would love an option to filter this data by search provider, i.e. see Bing vs Yahoo data but currently it does not seem possible.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools Enables HTML5 Interface
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Tools

Should we use dashes or underscores in our URLs?

Google re-opened the discussion recently with a new YouTube video that highlights how Google currently handles dashes and underscores, and also reminds us that Google and Bing differ on this bit of SEO minutiae.

Many of you will recall this was a pretty hot topic a few years ago when Google originally announced that both dashes and underscores both served as separators, and then backtracked on that statement about a week later, saying it “wasn’t a done deal yet.”

As the new video explains, it’s still not a done deal … and may never be. Google’s Matt Cutts says there’s still a difference between how Google treats underscores in URLs versus how it treats dashes.

In the video, Cutts explains that, when Google sees an underscore in a URL, it joins what’s before and after into one term. “We still join on the underscore and separate on the dash,” he says.

Perhaps most importantly from an SEO perspective, though, Cutts cautions webmasters against rewriting all of their existing URLs just to have dashes rather than underscores because the actual ranking impact is minimal:

It doesn’t make that much difference. It’s what we call a second-order effect. It’s not a primary thing that makes a huge difference.

And that can be considered a best practice, at least where Google is concerned, for the foreseeable future. In the video, Cutts says Google doesn’t have any employees working on changing how it handles underscores and dashes in URLs.

What About Bing & Underscores/Dashes?

In short: It makes no difference to Bing whether you use underscores or dashes in your URLs. A Bing spokesperson confirmed this for us via email today:

We do not differentiate between dash and underscore in our URL ranking features.

That’s the same response we got from Microsoft back in 2007, when Bing was known as Live Search.

So, What Should Webmasters Do?

The same advice that has applied for years still applies today: If you’re just starting on a new website, use dashes if you plan to place keywords in your URLs. Those keywords might provide a minor signal of what the page is about and help a wee bit with rankings. But if you have an existing website that’s already doing well in Google and Bing — pages are indexed, you’re getting quality natural search traffic, etc. — don’t switch from underscore-based URLs to dashes. The potential problems from changing URLs might be worse than the potential gains from having dashes rather than underscores in your URLs.

In July 2010, Bing revamped Webmaster Tools adding some additional reports and information but did not remove the requirement of having Silverlight to view the detailed reports. Vanessa Fox said this was a major draw back to the tool since “most of the data is available only graphically, and not as a download, without Silverlight, you basically can’t use Bing Webmaster Tools at all.”

Now with the new HTML5 support, all this wonderful data is now available to any modern browser – with or without Silverlight.

We knew Bing was working on dropping or supplementing Silverlight with HTML5. In fact, they have been pushing HTML5 on Bing Search.

Bing has yet to announce this but I suspect they will soon.

Related Stories:

• All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools Launches New Link Reports; Google Webmaster Tools Changes Theirs
• Bing To Add Link Reports To Webmaster Tools & Google Adds More Data To Query Reports
• Bing Tests New Top Bar Navigation & HTML5 Preview Coming Soon

Is +1 (pronounced “Plus One”) part of the new social network that Google’s long been rumored to be building? Or is +1 simply that “social layer” that Google has said would come and isn’t really meant as a rival to Facebook?

Yes.

Come along — let’s see how it works now, where it might go, and we’ll get into the bigger picture stuff at the end.

+1 Your Favorite Google Search Results

Beginning today, a small percentage of Google search users on Google.com in the United States searching in English will now see a +1 button next to search listings, when they are logged in. An example of this is shown below:

Don’t see it? Don’t panic. Unlike the iPad 2, +1 buttons are in plentiful supply. Just visit Google Experimental, where you can select an option to force it to appear in your searches.

Click on the button, and it lights up all colorfully:

When you’re done, you’ve “+1′d” it, as Google says, to your social network. Arguably, it might be correct to say “+1d” rather than “+1′d” — but I’ll save the Grammar Girl ruling for another time.

You’re also given an option to undo your +1ing, and you’re reminded that you’ve shared your liking of the result publicly to your social network.

There’s that mention of your social network again! Which social network? Your +1 social network, which is different than your Google Social Search network, which is different again from your Facebook network, your Twitter network and so on.

Don’t worry. I’ll get back to all this.

+1 Results From Your Network In Search

When you do a search when logged into Google, any results that you’ve +1′d — or which have been +1′d by those in your network — will be enhanced:

In the example above, you can see how one of the results coming up in a search for “nintendo” has two names attached to it. Those are two people in the searcher’s network who have liked this particular listing, plus the searcher is told there are 16 others in their network who like it.

In addition, if a search result has gained a lot of +1s but not from people in your network, you’ll still be told the total without anyone being named. That way, you can get a sense of how popular the page might be generally with +1 users.

Improving Search Results With Recommendations

The idea makes a lot of sense. If you’re searching, it’s nice to see if there are any answers that are recommended by your friends. Indeed, it makes so much sense that Google’s already been kind of offering this already through Google Social Search for nearly two years. But now these explicit recommendations become part of that.

“The primary benefit is that search gets better. It gets better in the user interface immediately, and we’ll look at it as a potential signal to improve search quality as well. I find social search extremely useful, especially with the recent updates. This change continues the evolution of social search, and it’s a natural progression to improve the search experience,” said Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who is most known for leading Google’s search spam fighting team but who also helped launch Google Social Search in 2009.

I’ll get back to how this fits into Google Social Search further below, as well as Bing’s Facebook-powered rival to that. But for now, let’s press on with more about how the new +1 works.

+1 For AdWords

Aside from Google’s search listings, you can also favorite ads from Google AdWords that show up in search results. Just click on the +1 buttons that will now show up next to them:

As with regular search results, any +1 favoring you do will show next to those ads, if others in your social network see them. And any +1s that they do on ads will be displayed for you.

Some FAQ For Advertisers & Site Owners

At this point, I can hear some advertisers going “Whaaaaat?!” We’ll have some follow-up articles soon here on Search Engine Land that look at what advertisers think about these +1 buttons showing up next to their ads.

For its part, Google tells me that it thinks advertisers will love this, that in testing it has done, clickthrough rates on +1′d ads go up, and that the company feels it’s unlikely that people will accidentally hit the ad link (costing the advertiser money) rather than the +1 button. Some other facts from Google:

• All ads will be getting these buttons
• There’s no way for advertisers to turn them off
• Clicks on the +1 button next to ads do NOT count as a paid ad click
• Advertisers will be able to see stats about which ads are getting the most +1s

Non-advertisers feeling left out on the stat front? Hang in there. Google told me that “soon after launch,” anyone registered with Google Webmaster Central will be able to see +1 stats for their non-paid or “organic” search listings.

Coming Soon: +1 For Web Sites

So far, I’ve covered how the +1 buttons work in Google’s search results. At the moment, that’s the only place you’ll see them. But “coming soon” (Google tells me in months, rather than weeks), publishers will be able to put these buttons on their web pages.

Yes, that’s right. Soon you’ll be able to add Google +1 buttons to your collection, along with Facebook’s Like buttons and Twitter’s Tweet buttons.

Google wouldn’t say much about how +1 buttons will work on web sites. For instance, if you come to a web site while logged in at Google, will you see if others in your network have +1′d a page you’re on, in the way Facebook Like buttons work?

No answer. Google is, I was told, is more focused on how +1 integrates with search right now.

Google did say that if someone does a +1 on a web page, then that will show up to others who find that page in search results. That’s going to be a huge bribe, in my view, for getting wide adoption of these buttons on web sites.

Still can’t wait? There’s a sign-up page at Google, where you can request being notified when the button is available.

Postscript: Clearly, Google does intend to personalize content on other sites. You can see this in the sign-up box below, in the Getting Started section. But Tom Critchlow also spotted how the personalization page provides more about this:

This sounds very similar to how Facebook Instant Personalization works, for the select sites that Facebook partners with, as well as how more broadly, a Facebook Like button will draw personalized content about friends from Facebook into a third-party web site.

Getting Started With +1

Ready to start +1ing things? You’ll need a Google Profile, to start. Chances are, you have one already, though you might not have pimped it out. See our previous article below for more about that:

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”

From your profile page, you’ll need to opt-in to +1:

As I said earlier, if you don’t have this option showing automatically, visit Google Experimental, where you can make it appear for you.

After you’re enrolled, you’ll be able to manage all your +1s on a special “tab” of your profile that only you can see (unless you chose to make it public):

Now Google’s redesign of profile pages earlier this month of profile pages makes sense, eh?

Your +1 Social Network…

Let’s talk about your +1 social network now. When you enable +1, it will be made up of:

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

What’s missing are people you are connected to via non-Google services, such as Twitter, Flickr or Quora. That’s something that will come in the future, Google says.

Indeed, we know that there are some “hidden” options that were added to Google Profiles recently, allowing you to connect those profiles to other social networking accounts. It could be that these will be enabled soon, as part of the +1 rollout.

Your Google Social Search Network

What’s confusing, perplexing or otherwise odd is that Google already allows you to create a social network that combines contacts from Google-based services (such as Google Buzz) with your networks from third-party sites like Twitter.

Google does this as part of its Google Social Search service. This combined network used to be called your “Social Circle” on Google, back when Google Social Search launched formally in January 2010 (it was an experiment before that). That launch also provided a way to view your social circle.

You can still view your social circle here on Google, but now these are called your “social connections.” I’m not sure when the name was changed, but I suspect it was dropped fairly recently, in the wake of a rumor earlier this month that Google was about to launch a “Google Circles” social network. Google’s help page still talks about your “social circle.”

All your social connections are used to help power Google Social Search results. But only your Google-based connections, right now, will power +1 matches within Social Search. Officially, Google says this is because it wants to start conservatively with +1, ramp up slowly and make sure everything works.

Google Social Search, Now With +1 Recommendations

It was just over a month ago that Google massively overhauled Google Social Search, which is a way that Google shows things that those in your social network have created or shared that are relevant to searches you do. In fact, we had a big giant article all about it:

• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”

Here’s an example of how Google Social Search works:

In that example, I did a search for “Corona del Mar bakery.” One of the pages that came up had been shared by someone I know and follow on Twitter, Amy Senk, so this was highlighted to me with a little “Amy Senk shared this on Twitter” message.

There were no buttons involved. Amy didn’t explicitly choose to recommend this page to others on her social network, via Google. Instead, Google Social Search saw she shared it through another network and used that, along with her connection to me, to highlight the page.

Now Google Social Search will gain +1 recommendations, content that people are explicitly recommending using Google’s +1 buttons. Google Social Search remains, but in addition to the first two items below, it now gains a third feature:

1. Show content created by those in your social network
2. Show content shared by those in your social network
3. Show content recommended by those in your Google +1 network

Social search signals, including the new +1 recommendations, will also continue to influence the first two things below plus power the new, third option:

1. Influence the ranking of results, causing you to see things others might not, based on your social connections
2. Influence the look of results, showing names of those in your social network who created, shared or now recommend a link
3. Influence the look of results, showing an aggregate number of +1s from all people, not just your social network, for some links

What Happens To Google Buzz?

Just over a year ago, Google launched Google Buzz, which initially looked to be Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare all wrapped into one. That is, it allowed for:

• Foursquare-like “check-ins”
• Facebook-like “newsfeed” of activity by friends
• Quick Twitter-like “updates”

None of this really took off. For example, consider that since the beginning of the year until now, according to figures from Google Buzz that I track:

• Mashable has gained about 100,000 Twitter followers versus about 100 Buzz followers
• TechCrunch has gained about 100,000 Twitter followers versus about 90 Buzz followers
• Robert Scoble has gained about 17,000 Twitter followers versus about 300 Buzz followers
• Search Engine Land has gained about 8,000 Twitter followers versus 51 Buzz followers

I wouldn’t say Buzz is dead, but it certainly isn’t buzzing. Any Foursquare-like pretensions seems to have been off-loaded onto the on-going location battle between Google Latitude, Google Hotpot, Google Places and Google Maps. Google itself isn’t sure which will win there, or even if there will be one winner.

Buzz does continue to provide a way to issue updates and get them from your network. But it clearly has nowhere near the activity of either Twitter or Facebook.

I suspect Buzz will be allowed to sit doing not much of anything, as +1 starts to build around in and perhaps replace it. Certainly one of the first things to go will be the Buzz buttons that you occasionally spot on the web.

Using +1 buttons is far more compelling. Those promise to increase your site’s visibility in Google’s incredibly popular search results, rather than in the little used Google Buzz area.

Finally, there’s giant irony. Earlier today, Google agreed to have its privacy controls audited over the next 20 years, in a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy mistakes with the Google Buzz launch.

What About Google Me Or Emerald Sea?

Meanwhile, we’ve had rumor-after-rumor that Google is building a new social network beyond Google Buzz, one especially meant to challenge Facebook.

There was Google Me, said to be a full-blown Facebook challenger, in the middle of last year. By the end of the year, an internal product name of Emerald Sea started floating around. It was also rumored to be called +1. There was speculation that +1 would be the name of a new toolbar for the Google site — or a Chrome extension — or related to video conferencing.

Google’s standard response for about the past six months or so now has been to deny that it’s building a social network at all. Instead, the company has talked about adding social “layers” into everything at Google.

When I asked about the various past rumors, and how they relate to today’s launch, I got back a statement continuing the “layers” theme:

As we’ve already been saying, we’re committed to making the web more people-centric, and we’ve been gradually giving people new ways to share things and interact within our products. This is just another example of how we’re centering our products around the millions of people who use them every day.

Our focus is on improving our search results–to ensure we get the most relevant results to our users as quickly as possible. Relationships and recommendations are one way to help us achieve that goal–and this is what today’s announcement is all about.

Reading Between The Lines

Here’s the thing about Google’s claim that it’s not building a rival social network. When rumors started emerging about Google Checkout, Google made similar claims about how it wasn’t some type of PayPal rival. It was.

Google might have convinced itself it’s not building a social network, but +1 certainly seems to be a good start toward one. While it is beginning as a “layer” that’s part of search, those +1 buttons — when they hit the web — will put Google directly alongside Facebook in the “liking” game.

All the excitement that some had — and still have — about how Facebook’s Like buttons were going to give the company amazing insight about the web? Now Google’s on track to potentially get the same.

The New PageRank?

Google, of course, has already had more insight into the entire web than Facebook, even without having a Like button rival. That’s because despite the popularity of Facebook’s buttons, not every page on the web has Like buttons. There are tens of billions of web pages out there. The web is huge! Nor does everyone on the web push those buttons.

In contrast, Google’s toolbar data alone gives it insight into how much people “like” particular pages just by measuring time on site. It can also measure things like bounce rate from its search results to sites, and counting links to measure popularity still isn’t dead. These are just some of the tools Google has.

Still, recording explicit likes (or +1s,  or whatever) has value, especially in a time when the way Google has primarily relied on determining if a page is good — looking at links — has become very creaky. People continue buy links, spam links or not give links to sites that deserve them (Wikipedia takes, but none of its outbound links give back to deserving sites).

If links were like votes originally, then likes are also votes — but more trusted ones, especially when they are heavily used within someone’s specific social network (friends don’t generally spam friends).

In short, +1 becomes the new PageRank. OK, that’s kind of catchy, but more accurately, +1 recommendations can become an important new signal for Google to use as part of its overall ranking algorithm, during a time when it desperately needs new signals.

Calling For New Ranking Signals

By the way, the image just above was from my keynote talk at our recent SMX West search marketing conference, which covered the unprecedented changes we’re going through now, as search engines seek better ranking signals.

I’ll write up my keynote as an article in the near future, but you can watch the video of it below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll also be getting back to this topic during our SMX Advanced Seattle event on June 7 and 8, as part of our The New Periodic Table Of SEO session. So come on out (and book early if so, as tickets sold out a month prior to the event last year).

Facebook Versus Google

Beyond web page ranking, the new +1 button potentially allows Google to leverage search to build its own robust “social graph” or “view” of how people are connected to each other. Right now, Google can see some connections, such as people who tweet to each other. But +1 may allow Google to see more direct connections.

Google has been especially hobbled in that Facebook is unwilling to let people export their contacts directly to Google. Meanwhile, Google keeps saying that there’s something in Facebook’s terms and conditions that prevent it from using Facebook Connect to link to Facebook’s social data in the way that even tiny Blekko does.

That something, as best I can tell, is that Google doesn’t want Facebook to see inside its network, in the way that Facebook would like. But getting a straight answer from either company just doesn’t work. They remain at a standoff. The articles below have more about this:

• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!

+1 Won’t Kill Facebook

What’s +1 mean for Facebook? A very good chance that Facebook’s seeming monopoly on how people “like” pages will be over. Facebook’s Like buttons have a big bribe. Get liked and potentially get substantial traffic from Facebook. Speaking of which, here are some tips on that from us, below:

• How To Put The Facebook “Like” Button On A Site
• How To Optimize For Facebook’s New ‘Like’ Functionality
• How To Convert Website Visitors To Facebook Likes

Google +1 has the same compelling bribe. Get +1s, and potentially get more search traffic from Google. Expect +1 buttons to go up right alongside Facebook buttons, all over the web. But +1 is unlikely to supplant Facebook, which is far more than just putting out Like buttons.

Facebook is a compelling destination that offers many reasons for people to stay with it, perhaps the most important being that everyone seems to be there already. Plenty of your friends are there, if you want to interact that way. And going to Google is hard, because not only doesn’t Facebook let you “export” those friends, but even if it did — the friends might not want to come over.

In the end, Google seems to be making a smart play. Rather than aiming head-on at Facebook, a tough battle, Google’s using its strongest product to cherry pick one of the things it’s probably most envious about Facebook having, recommendation data.

If +1 works, it will not only improve search quality. It might make search ads more engaging,  potentially improves Google’s contextual ads and eventually may turn into a core social product that can expand in new directions.

About That Name

Earlier this month, I joked that I wanted Google to launch a “PageRank This” button for web sites. The new +1 button is kind of like that, though it has been in development well before my joke.

But seriously, +1 as a name? I’ve already seen people question how to pronounce it. Worse, how do you search for it? Some are going to search for “Plus One” and not find it, unless Google adopts that alternative spelling.

As for “+1″ itself, you literally cannot search for that on Google. Seriously. Look:

Any search term that has a + symbol in front of it is a special command that tells Google to find pages that have that exact term. So the search above for +1 actually means a search for the number 1. If you want to find +1, you have to search for ++1. But that doesn’t work — Google ignores the extra + symbol.

Over on Google News, where there are tons of stories about the new service, you also won’t find them with a +1 search:

Instead, you have to search for “google +1” — which also works for regular Google search — to finally get results:

Over time, this might sort itself out. But it does feel pretty odd for a search engine to give its new search tool an unsearchable name.

Some Social Search Perspective

Google’s move today is just the latest in a long line of ways it has “socialized” its results. I’d highly recommend reading our articles below that cover other important social developments at Google. Some of them also give some perspective on how while social is useful, it alone is not a cure for improving bad results:

• Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”, Oct. 2009
• Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features, Jan. 2010
• In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social, Oct. 2010
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”, Feb. 2011
• You Can Hate (Block) But No Longer Love (Star) Google’s Search Results, March 2011

Meanwhile over at Bing, Facebook data has been used for months to reshape its results. It was a big leap for Bing. And yet, despite results being instantly socialized through Facebook Connect, so far there’s no indication that this feature is driving huge numbers of visitors to Bing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Bing got socialized, just as Google had done before it. But the nirvana of shiny high quality search results that some predicted Facebook data in particular and social data in general would bring hasn’t really arrived, I’d say. The articles below cover more about Bing’s efforts

• Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results, Oct. 2010
• Blekko, Bing & How Facebook Likes Are Changing Search, Dec. 2010
• Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further Into Its Search Results, Feb. 2011

Still, I am noticing when social results appear on both Google and Bing, an I am increasingly finding them helpful. It’s still very early days about how social data is being used. And that leads to another article with more background on this topic:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Finally, social search is perhaps best viewed as an important part of the increasingly personalized search results that both Google and Bing are delivering. The articles below cover more about this:

• Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Postscript: See our follow-up stories:

• How To Get Google +1 Buttons For Your Website
• Google’s +1 A Potential Boon To Paid Search Marketers