Bing has now officially revised the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and now it is in action. The Head of Evangelism at Bing Christi Olson said on Twitter
“We sought to modernized the guidelines to provide more clarity and easy to understand insights on how Bing discovers, indexes and ranks content.”
It's official, @BingWMC has updated and modernized Bing Webmaster Guidelines today. We saught to modernized the guidelines to provide more clarity and easy to understand insights on how Bing discovers, indexes and ranks content. #SEO #WebmasterTools https://t.co/sotBcNcwU2 pic.twitter.com/e83BtmWspK
— Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson) June 30, 2020
Guidelines Are Formatted Into These Sections:
- How Bing finds and does the indexing of your site
- Help Bing to understand your webpages
- How Bing ranks your content
- Abuses and examples of stuff to avoid
Bing says in the new guidelines that now it supports the new rel=” sponsored” and rel= “ugc” link attributes that Google released last year in September. Bing says that they are looking it for adoption but as of now it doesn’t seem like a solid signal for Bing. The guidelines say
Make a reasonable effort to ensure that any paid or advertisement links on your site use rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” or rel=”ugc” attribute to prevent the links from being followed by a crawler and from potentially impacting search rankings.”
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But right now the Bing has confirmed it his looking for adoption and it is not a strong signal “that can always change based on adoption and usage within the webmaster community.” Bing will give the update when it changes.
We (myself, @BingWMC, @CoperniX, @facan) received some questions about rel=sponsored/ugc. We have been and are continuing to monitoring it as a signal. Right now, it's not as strong or important of a signal – but that can change based on adoption and usage. https://t.co/lZR05knahR
— Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson) July 1, 2020
Bing also discusses its ranking factors and how it ranks pages in its Webmaster Guidelines.