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Bing has spent the past year working on revising the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and now it is live. The prior version was from the original 2012 version but now, it has been almost completely revamped.
You can check out the guidelines over here.
Christi Olson, the Head of Evangelism at Bing, said on Twitter "We sought to modernized the guidelines to provide more clarity and easy to understand insights on how Bing discovers, indexes and ranks content."
It's official, @BingWMC has updated and modernized Bing Webmaster Guidelines today. We saught to modernized the guidelines to provide more clarity and easy to understand insights on how Bing discovers, indexes and ranks content. #SEO #WebmasterTools https://t.co/sotBcNcwU2 pic.twitter.com/e83BtmWspK
— Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson) June 30, 2020
The new guidelines are broken down into these sections:
(1) How Bing finds and indexes your site
(2) Help Bing understand your pages
(3) How Bing ranks your content
(4) Abuse and Examples of Things to Avoid
As I covered at Search Engine Land; Bing in these new guidelines, says it supports the new rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" link attributes that Google introduced last September. I do not think Bing said they would support these attributes.
I asked Bing and it is "monitoring it for adoption" but "right now it's not as strong of a signal for Bing."
The language used in the guidelines says "Make a reasonable effort to ensure that any paid or advertisement links on your site use rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" attribute to prevent the links from being followed by a crawler and from potentially impacting search rankings." I mean, "prevent" is a strong word.
But Bing said while it is monitoring it for adoption and it is not a strong signal, "that can always change based on adoption and usage within the webmaster community." When or if it does change, Bing will let us know.
We (myself, @BingWMC, @CoperniX, @facan) received some questions about rel=sponsored/ugc. We have been and are continuing to monitoring it as a signal. Right now, it's not as strong or important of a signal - but that can change based on adoption and usage. https://t.co/lZR05knahR
— Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson) July 1, 2020
Also, in these new Bing Webmaster Guidelines, Bing describes its ranking factors and how it ranks pages. Super interesting...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
