Following the Google’s Panda slap, now Bing reasserts it’s stand for quality content as well.
When we think of quality content, Google Search is our the first automated response. However, to reinstate it’s position, Bing’s, Duane Forrester’s blog gives webmasters some tips and tricks to creating quality content to ensure that both the users and the search engines respond to your website.
Unlike Google, that has left webmasters across the globe in murky waters of Reconsider Request, Bing seems to provide us with rather quick and easy to follow pointers that will easily make their crawler conclude that your website has quality content.
Following are the steps Bing suggests you avoid whilst producing content:
“Duplicate content” – don’t use articles or content that appear in other places. Produce your own unique content.
Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.”
When looking to optimize your website this comprehensive list of ‘don’t’ seems like a good place to start from. However, some skeptics may question the reason behind Bing emphasis on quality at this juncture; is this guide any early indication towards Bing’s version of Google like Panda update? Hmmm…