Bing’s New Webmaster Guidelines and Message Forums

This month, Bing has announced its new webmaster guidelines which shows website owners and developers how to optimize their websites for Bing Search, a product of Microsoft. Now most website owners and developers usually will ignore Bing and rely on Google optimization instead. It is true that Google is currently the dominant search engine in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but its always good to prepare for Bing as they seem to be in a race to try to take control of this market.

In this article, I will point out and discuss the new webmaster guidelines in Bing. I will then show you how you can use the webmaster guidelines on your message forum and how you can start optimizing for Bing or at least have a plan of action to optimize for it if it ever comes a need to. A message forum is a bit different when it comes to SEO. There are many SEO methods that will simply not work with a message forum or they will give more results. The one thing you also want to remember is that you shouldn’t do too much in terms of SEO because it could hurt you on Google as they have planned to start giving lower rankings and penalties to heavily added SEO-Rich websites.

Content
Like most other search engines, including Google, Bing needs content. Bing wants to see content that is rich, unique and constant. This is perfect for a message forum because you have the facilities to make this exact need possible. On a forum, we can constantly make new topics and replies which is seen as content. We can use our imagination and come up with something unique and fresh when we create our topics. The content needs to be rich and you need to think “interaction” when you are bringing in new content. Bing loves content that engages readers and a forum is supposed to be for just that. So your duties when it comes to content is to make fresh content as much as possible and make it with a devotion to get readers and replies and you will be doing one of the best Bing optimizing methods you could be doing.

Back Links
You need to get back links as much as possible. A back link will show a search engine that they trust the content of your forum. This will give you a higher ranking in the search engine that is indexing your forum and finding your links on other parts of the web. Bing loves back links because it shows trust in your message forum. However, Bing wants to see more natural links than anything else. So buying back links and using link farms will not help you. Instead do some link exchanges and try to make good enough content that people want to link to it. Have some proper tools available to members for sharing your content such as social bookmarking and url sniplets. The best way to get a better back link is if a member posts one of the topic links on another site. This can be easier when you make articles on your forum concerning a specific niche. The better articles to make are the ones that actually teach someone how to do something.

Bing is Social
As much as many of us don’t want to integrate into the social networking world, Bing has. This means that is you think “more social” when it comes to your message forum, it will likely help you when optimizing for Bing Search. So you may want to consider integating some social features into your forum such as Facebook Likes and Tweet This. Microsoft and Facebook actually have a partnership with one and other. Facebook is integrated into Bing Search throught the results and through sharing. So Facebook would be the better social network to use when integrating it into your forum. This is becoming a social age and many of us need to sit down and think about that and see if we should get on the band wagon or not.

Indexation
Bing needs to be able to find your message forum and its content! So this is where you need to work more on your link building. Get your links out there so Bing and other search engines can find them. Utilize forum signatures, bigger ranking forum and link directories, DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Answers, blog comments, blog articles, link exchanges and natural back links. You can do all this for free too but you will have to actually do some work on it. The more links you have on the net, the more ways Bing can find you and the higher ranking you will get in Bing Search. Bing also recommends that you use their Webmaster Tools to help show you the results of your optimization on their search engine. You can even see how Bingbot indexes your forum using those tools which could help you in making any changes that are needed.

Technical Stuff
Bing wants to see fast loading message forums! This is actually something Google now requires as well and its a good thing. If I were to visit a forum that wasn’t loading quickly, I would likely x out of it and not return. You need to make sure your hosting services are reliable and fast. I recommend staying away from free hosting services as the majority of free hosting users report that those services are extremely slow especially when your forum starts to get active. The best times for search engines and SEO is when you forum is very active so you want to make sure the forum can handle activity. A robots.txt file needs to be placed in the root of your forum’s directory (www.your-forum.com/robots.txt). Be careful not to block Bingbot otherwise they will not be able to crawl on your forum and you will not rank well in their search engine.

Bing wants to utilize sitemaps but this poses an issue with message forums. There is so much content that usually comes with a message forum that it sometimes because impossible to use a site map. I would not worry too much about this issue. There are modifications and free services out there in which you can send sitemaps. You can use those and it may be some additional help but its not something I would dwell on. You also need to make sure the sitemap contains new content. If it contains a bunch of the same content from the last sitemap, it really isn’t going to help you or your forum that much when it comes to Bing and other search engines.

Watch what you add to your forum. Some addons including anything with Flash and JavaScript will actually be negative when it comes to Bing. Bingbot really cannot crawl those sorts of technologies and that will lower your ranking. Of course, with JavaScript, sometimes this isn’t possible to work around since a lot of forum software includes that sort of script. However, you can prevent more to be added by watching what modifications and custom coding you perform on your message forum. The trick is that you should refrain from adding such technologies that Bingbot cannot index and then you and your forum should be fine.

When you are using redirects such as when you move your content, you need to take the proper steps on doing it. Bing would rather you use a 301 Permanent redirect rather than a 302 Temporary one. However, if you have to use a 301 redirect, it isn’t frowned upon that badly. The main thing you need to do it check your link. You want to make sure all your links work and that none of them give you any errors or are not found. Bad links can sometimes give you bad ranking in search. You also want to use canonical tags as much as possible because it you show Bing whether a URL is is original or not.

The SEO Side of Things!
This is the fun part! Now you get to dive into the SEO parts of your message forum. You will want to make sure your title tags are simple relevant to your forum. This includes taking out the forum name on topics, replies, pages and so on. There just needs to be the name of the page they are looking at and nothing else. You can continue to use meta tags but you need to keep them simple, short and relevant to the forum. You should use on sentence to describe the forum and no more than 6-8 meta keywords. You should be using alt tags for images so that an image can be described to the Bingbot. H1 tags added to topics and pages are useful because it describes what content the Bingbot is crawling.

You should link to things in a wise manner. You should use a lot of internal linking. For example, if you make an article about your niche, you should link to a few discussions on your forum that relate to the article’s content. You should also link to other websites and forums that are not your own. Make sure the third-party links are relevant to the topic or content you are linking them to. You also need to make sure that websites you link to can be trusted because it will help with your rank on Bing. You don’t need to be linking to websites that use Black Hat SEO, are illegal or have a lot of errors and downtime. Sometimes this can be difficult when running a forum if you allow others to add links to their signatures. You should also add methods for social sharing (Digg, Facebook, Tweet This, etc.) as this is something Bing is now into.

You should keep your navigation simple and clean. You content needs to have easy access! If your content is inside JavaScript or Flash, the Bingbot will likely not be able to get to it and that will harm your SEO ranking with Bing Search. You also want to make sure you keep your content at the top. The idea is that the search engine bots can quickly get to your content without having any road blocks. If your forum links uses sessions, you may want to find a way to install a “pretty url” system or something like that so that links are straight forward to the crawling of your forum. You want to make your links as simple as possible so that they can be read then with ease.

What to Avoid
Do not cloak your forum pages. That is when you show one version of the page to a crawler and show another version to your members. Both the search engine bots and the members need to be seeing the same page on your forum. Do not use link farms and link schemes as it will hurt you in search ranking on most any search engine. Stay away from social media schemes like sites to get you auto followers and likes from strangers who won’t even care about being active on your forum. Most of the social media scheme sites are being made to make money, they never really do good for websites and especially message forums. Lastly, you need to try to reduce the amount of duplicate content that your forum gets. There is really no search engine that wants to see the same content over and over again.

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