Bing has posted a blog that describes in detail the way in which its algorithm interprets and ranks content based on its quality. It was written by the company’s senior program manager, Michael Basilyan.
The post, titled ‘The Role of Content Quality in Bing Ranking’, lays out what the Microsoft search engine considers to be the three most important aspects of website content:
Authority – content from trustworthy websites (and authors) is much preferred, as Bing’s algorithm takes this into account.
Utility – information of an appropriate length and level of detail ranks well on Bing – supplementary multimedia content such as videos, images and graphs are also desirable.
Presentation – Bing likes well-designed and easily navigable pages. It also knows when content is hidden behind or among adverts, and penalises websites that do this as it sees them as untrustworthy.
Basilyan then explains how context comes into play – saying that factors considered include topicality and the searcher’s geographical location.
Working to increase user engagement
To sign off, he summarises the company’s current focus on improving the search engine’s overall performance: “Much of our work is spent in improving our ranking engine’s performance. When we prepare a change to the ranking algorithm, we always systematically evaluate its performance against these axes and validate it with real users on Bing.com to ensure increased user engagement and satisfaction.”
Bing recently announced plans to become ‘ubiquitous’, and it was announced earlier this month that Bing has increased its market share among UK search engine users by 0.35 per cent. Meanwhile, both Google and Yahoo have experienced decreases in their market shares, which would indicate that it has already made some progress.