Bing considers page quality before indexing

In our ongoing coverage of Bing’s search ranking factors, which the company listed out when it published its new webmaster guidelines, I asked the search company about its indexing benchmarks: Does Bing index everything or does a site or a page have to meet a specific quality threshold for it to be indexed by Bing?

This is from our interview with Microsoft’s Christi Olson and Fabrice Canal, on Live with Search Engine Land about What SEOs need to know about Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

We already dug into the fact that Bing uses user engagement metrics in its search ranking factors and we did a deeper dive into some of Bing’s ranking factors. Now, we cover a topic I find interesting — whether Bing will index a page that does not meet a specific quality mark.

What Bing does not want to index

Canal, principal program manager at Bing, Microsoft, said it is 100% the case that Bing does not want to index all the content on the web. “For instance, I will not index junk content,” Canal said. Examples of junk pages, he said, include “a completely empty page . . . a page with a completely broken experience, JavaScript errors,” he said Bing does not want to index it. Also, Bing does “not want to index ” spammy content or pages that have malicious activities on them, he said.

In summary, Bing does not want to index:

• Empty pages
• Junk content
• Broken experiences
• JavaScript-like errors that likely disable the page
• Spammy pages
• Malicious pages

Bing’s list of things to avoid

“And that goes into the final section of the Webmaster Guidelines, things to avoid,” Christi Olson from Bing added, “So when sites have substantial amounts of the things to avoid, they could potentially get demoted or not indexed.”

Here is Bing’s list of what to avoid:

• Cloaking
• Link schemes, link buying, link spamming
• Social media schema
• Duplicate content
• Scraped content
• Keyword stuffing or loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Automatically generated content
• Affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Malicious behavior
• Misleading structured data markup