Igor Rondel, Principal Development Manager of Bing’s Index Quality Team, has just published a blog post apologising to webmasters and stating that they can expect to see Bing be more proactive in terms of communicating with webmasters via the Bing Webmaster Blog from now on. Igor said that he felt Bing needed to be more proactive about communicating updates, and has promised that the Bing Index Quality Team will be posting on the webmaster blog every few weeks, posting regular updates, ideally hoping to make posts on a bi-weekly or a monthly basis. In addition to promising better communication, they also promised that they would actively monitor their feeds for questions and comments, and be more pro-active about responding to them. They said that they will cover topics ranging from the latest search updates to new innovations and any planned changes that could potentially impact a webmaster’s traffic.
Filtering Low Quality Results
The first topic that Bing covered as a part of their improved webmaster engagement plan was low quality link filtering. There was no big news in their post about the subject, rather they simply discussed the principles that they are already applying. Bing explained how they plan to assess web documents against several standards, including appropriateness and quality, and how they will take action to improve the quality of their search results, and share any action they take with their downstream components to offer the best possible search experience. Next, Bing will be discussing their new and improved Site Safety page.
Webmasters Matter
Bing’s decision to more pro-actively engage with webmasters comes at a good time. Google’s Matt Cutts is currently taking a short holiday to spend time with his family, and while Google does have other people who engage with the webmaster community, Cutts is, to many people, the face of the company. His absence may frustrate those who are accustomed to watching his frequent Webmaster Talk videos. Bing currently holds the number two spot in the search engine popularity rankings, but it is a long way behind Google. It is unlikely that they will close the gap simply by spending more time talking to webmasters, but this is still an important step forward and one that may help the search engine to be taken more seriously. It may also help to attract attention to the Bing Ads platform, which is working hard to differentiate itself from AdWords.
