google 

Google’s exact match close variants expand again: Now include same meaning variations

Exclusive: The latest machine learning-powered update to close variants means exact match will match to the intent of the query. Google’s exact match keyword targeting used to mean one thing: the keyword had to match exactly whatever query the searcher used. Then close variants came into the mix, and that definition has steadily morphed over the past few years. First including plurals, misspellings and other similar variants came in 2014 and then different word order and function words took hold in 2017. Now phase three is here. On Thursday, Google…

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Bing 

The ultimate guide to using Bing Webmaster Tools – Part 5

Contributor and Bing Chief Evangelist Christi Olson outlines the free publicity tools Bing offers in part 5 of our Bing WMT series. In the first four parts of this series, I reviewed the free tools Bing makes available to all webmasters once you have created, logged in and verified your Bing Webmaster Tools account. Every subsequent time you log in, you get access to meaty data and an analysis of your websites’ performance, indexing, and crawling history on Bing. However, you can also use some free publicly-available tools that don’t…

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