Bing: Content Quality Is A Primary Ranking Factor Made Up Of Authority, Utility & Presentation

Michael Basilyan, Senior Program Manager from the Bing Content Quality Team, shared a nice set of details on the Bing blog about how Bing’s algorithms determine what makes for content quality.

Michael Basilyan explained that content quality is a primary factor in their ranking algorithm, along with topical relevance and context. Michael then went on to explain that content quality is made up of three primary factors, authority, utility and presentation.

Authority : Content Quality

Bing defines authority as if they can trust the content. How do they know if they can trust the content? It is not just about the links pointing to the page but also about how established the web site and web page is. In addition, Bing looks at signals from social networks to see if the author is well cited, recognized and an authority in the space. They also explain that how they determine authority changes by query segment, where health authorities need professional documents written about the authority.

Utility : Content Quality

This is about determining if the page written is useful and detailed enough to the searcher for them to accomplish their task. Does the page have enough supporting citations. Is it detailed enough for the typical searcher. Bing also prefers to see videos, images and graphs on the page – those are signals of utility and content quality.

A factor that may harm the content quality is repurposed or “recycled” content. They want pages that are the source of that data or do unique things with the data, not just pages that recycle the content from the source.

Presentation : Content Quality

This is about making sure the content on the page is easy to find and easy to read. If you have ads in the way, distracting and unrelated ads or the content is hard to find, this can hurt your content quality score. Bing says they will go as far as to “promote and support websites and webmasters that provide ads relevant to the content of their website and place ads so that they do not interfere with the user experience.”

Bing then shares some examples of the above.

For those who deal with Google Panda, a lot of this may sound very familiar.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He 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.