Bing updates its Webmaster Guidelines

• How Bing finds and indexes your site
• Help Bing understand your pages
• How Bing ranks your content
• Abuse and examples of things to avoid

Previous guidelines. It has been a while since Bing updated their guidelines. Bing first published its webmaster guidelines in 2012. We have those guidelines archived in this screen capture over here.

Why update it. Bing updated the Bing Webmaster Guidelines to include the various updates it has made to search over the years. This includes updates to how Bing crawls, indexes, ranks web pages, in addition to how Bing handles search spam.

Updated information around the URL submission API, support of rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc”, how Bing indexes JavaScript, the evergreen BingBot, and much more is all discussed in this document.

“It was time to modernize and refresh the global Bing Webmaster Guidelines, providing insights on how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes and ranks content.” Fabrice Canel, Principal PM Bing Webmaster Tools. “When Fabrice and I speak at industry events, we receive a lot of in-depth questions around the specifics of Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines and how elements from discovery to ranking have changed since we’ve refreshed Bing’s Webmaster Tools. We decided to refresh the entire guidelines to make them easier to understand while including  the most recent updates on crawling, indexing, ranking and quality.”  Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism Search at Microsoft.

Why we care. Often, the search engine guidelines act as the fundamental principles behind how the search engine crawls, indexes and ranks content. You want to make sure to read those guidelines to understand how the search engine works, and ensure you do not take steps to lead your site to be penalized by the search engine.