Bing: How We Pick Your Title Tag

Microsoft Bing published a blog post on how they decide on what title tags to publish in their search results.

We covered this in detail most recently via a Google Matt Cutts video on how Google selects a title tag. So let’s go over it with Bing, which is fairly similar.

Bing has the user in mind, so their goals in displaying the proper title tags are:

• Optimizes titles for relevance to the user. Titles are very powerful when it comes to showing how a site or document is relevant to a user’s query.
• Optimizes snippets. Snippets also help the user differentiate between search results at a more granular level.
• Optimizes display URLs. Users look at URLs to validate the source of information and gauge its authenticity. Bing tries to make it easy to see who is providing the information.

Bing then provides four ways to help ensure Bing chooses the title tag you specified.

• Make the HTML Title relevant to the queries that would be used to search your site without being overly long or repetitive. Avoid generic titles like “Home” or “About Us”.
• If you embed OpenGraph, etc., make sure it is consistent with the title you want, and that all the fields are correct, for example that your site name is correct.
• If your site is listed on dmoz.org or other directories make sure the entry is correct.
• Don’t block Bing’s crawler. Please refer to crawler control instructions on how to control the crawler, but keep in mind, you should not block Bingbot if you want your content to be indexed. By slowing the crawl rate (via the Webmaster Tools) or by blocking Bingbot in the robots.txt file, or even blocking Bing’s IP addresses, you can prevent us from crawling and indexing your content.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.