Bing Released A URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filtering That Impacted Three-Percent Of Queries

Igor Rondel, the Principal Development Manager of the Bing Index Quality, posted on the Bing Search Blog news that they released a spam filter a “few months” ago that impacted about 3% of all search queries. The spam filter was aimed at URL keyword stuffing. Igor Rondel it targeted spammers stuffing keywords in the URL […]

Igor Rondel, the Principal Development Manager of the Bing Index Quality, posted on the Bing Search Blog news that they released a spam filter a “few months” ago that impacted about 3% of all search queries. The spam filter was aimed at URL keyword stuffing.

Igor Rondel it targeted spammers stuffing keywords in the URL or domain in an effort to artificially boost their rankings in Bing. He specifically documented the types of URLs Bing looks at with this:

• Multiple hosts, with keyword-rich hostnames: https://account.free.online.savings.samedaypaydayloansusa.com
• Host/ domain names with repeating keywords: https://loan.payday.paydayloanspaydayloansusa.com
• URL cluster across same domain, but varied hostnames comprised of keyword permutations
  • https://contososhoeswomen.shoesonsale.com/
  • https://bestwomensrunningsneakers.shoesonsale.com/
  • https://discountrunningapparelforwomen.shoesonsale.com/
• URL squatting
  • This is a little different as the spammer is playing on a human tendency to misspell keywords & in effect syphoning traffic off of existing (typically high profile/ traffic) sites
  • E.g. https://nytime.com(misspelling ofhttps://nytimes.com), https://ebey.com (misspelling of https://ebay.com)

Bing Detects Keyword URL Stuffing

How does Bing detect this form of search spam? They wouldn’t say exactly but did document signals they look at to detect the spam, such as:

• Site size
• Number of hosts
• Number of words in host/ domain names and path
• Host/ domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams)
• % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords
• Host/ domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g., [“year,” “event | product name”], https://www.turbotaxonline2014.com)
• Site/page content quality and popularity signals

Impact Of This Spam Filter On Bing’s Search Results

With extreme transparency for a search engine, Bing shared the impact this spam filter had on their search results. They said it impacted about 3% of all search queries. Specifically impacting about 5 million sites, comprising around 130 million URLs. They even documented some example sites impacted by this spam filter.

• Users: This update impacted ~3% of Bing queries (on average ~1 in 10 URLs was filtered out per impacted query.)
• SEO community: ~5M sites, comprising > 130M urls, have been impacted, resulting in upwards of 75% reduction in traffic to these sites from Bing.