Bing 

A bigger Bing for your buck

Bing Ads doesn’t get the credit it deserves. While it’s true that Bing was slower to the paid ad game than Google and Yahoo, Bing Ads — formerly known as Microsoft’s MSN adCenter — has now been around for more than  a decade and boasts some pretty impressive stats in its own right. Consider that […] Bing Ads doesn’t get the credit it deserves. While it’s true that Bing was slower to the paid ad game than Google and Yahoo, Bing Ads — formerly known as Microsoft’s MSN adCenter —…

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Bing 

Robots.txt tip from Bing: Include all relevant directives if you have a Bingbot section

Pay close attention to the directives you give to Bingbot and other search engines in your robots.txt files. Frédéric Dubut, a senior program manager at Microsoft working on Bing Search, said on Twitter Wednesday that when you create a specific section in your robots.txt file for its Bingbot crawler, you should make sure to list all the default directives in that section. Specify directives for Bingbot. “If you create a section for Bingbot specifically, all the default directives will be ignored (except Crawl-Delay),” he said. “You MUST copy-paste the directives you want Bingbot…

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Bing 

Expert management of Bing Shopping Ads just got easier

Look to Google Shopping Ads best practices for ways to maximize sales with Bing Ads. History has a knack for repeating itself. More than 100 years ago, Ford dominated with mass-produced automobiles until GM, and others eventually caught up. Apple OWNED the smartphone market with the 2007 iPhone launch, but Samsung and others out-innovated the giant to nab big market share. Today, Google remains the undisputed king of search, yet we’re witnessing notable competitive evolution as Bing quietly, steadily boosts its market position against the giant. Without fail, the pros in…

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Bing 

Bing Ads now supports 3rd headline, 2nd description in text ads

You can now import your longer ads from Google or create new ones in Bing Ads. Early Thursday, several people noticed that Bing Ads now supports a third headline and second description (ad text), following Google’s move to give regular expanded text ads the same number of characters as its responsive search ads. Why you should care Google added an optional third headline and second description line for expanded text ads in August. Now, just a head of the holiday madness, advertisers can import those same ads into Bing Ads, or create new…

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Bing 

Bing competes with Google’s Gboard with SwiftKey partnership Google’s Gboard has some competiti

Google’s Gboard has some competition for its search-enabled keyboard now. SwiftKey, a keyboard application for Android, announced integration with Bing search directly in its keyboard. SwiftKey is a subsidiary of Microsoft, which also owns Bing. With the latest version of SwiftKey for Android, you can now search from your toolbar. In addition, you can quickly capture, crop and send a screenshot or share the URL from the SwiftKey keyboard. What’s new? There are new features on SwiftKey for Android that makes it easy and quick to share anything you want from the web.…

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Bing 

Bing now supports batch mode for submitting URLs to Bing

You can now use a single Bing API request to submit up to 500 URLs, instead of making 500 individual API requests. Bing announced it has added support to submit URLs to the search engine in batch mode. That means instead of making an API request for each URL you submit to Bing, you can batch multiple URLs into a single API request. Bing said it supports up to 500 URLs per batch submission. How it works. Bing said, this is “very similar to the individual URL Submission API (Blogpost) and hence integrating…

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Bing 

Microsoft Office hits pause on forcing Bing search in Chrome, Firefox

Rather than automatically changing default search engines for Chrome and Firefox, administrators are required to opt-in for it to do so network-wide. Microsoft recently announced a new “extension” as part of an update to its Office 365 ProPlus software that forcibly changes company-wide Chrome and Firefox search engine defaults to Bing search, automatically, from what is likely set to Google. After considerable backlash, the company is reversing course, a bit. In a predatory fashion, the extension automatically seeks out, through the network and local device file systems, installations of independent browsers (Chrome…

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Bing 

Bing adds snippet controls to help sites control their search result previews

Google began supporting these new controls last September and now Bing adds control for snippets. Bing announced Wednesday that it now supports new snippet controls with robots meta tags to help webmasters manage how their search results are displayed in Bing. These new controls work via robots meta tags in HTML or X-Robots-Tag tag in the HTTP Header. New meta tags to settings snippets. Here are the three new controls Bing offers: “max-snippet:[number]” — This lets you specify the maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet in search results. Here is the…

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Bing 

Bing Webmaster Tools allows site verification via Google Search Console

The beta option enables site owners to skip verification by importing. Bing has announced a beta feature that allows site owners to import their sites from Google Search Console to its own Webmaster Tools. After logging into Bing Webmaster Tools, site owners may be presented with an option reading, “Already verified on Google Search Console?Beta Skip verification by importing your site.” The option to import your site via Google Search Console presented after login. Users are limited to importing 100 websites at a time, with an overall cap of 1,000 site additions. It…

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Bing 

Bing Webmaster Tools adds Domain Connect verification integration

Bing makes it easier to verify some sites with Bing Webmaster Tools. In order to make it easier for some webmasters to verify their web sites with Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing added support for verification through Domain Connect. This allows those using 1&1 IONOS, GoDaddy, Media Temple or Plesk easier access to verify their web sites with Bing Webmaster Tools. Verification methods. Bing now offers four verification methods; (1) XML file authentication, (2) Meta tag authentication, (3) Add a CNAME record to DNS and (4) this new Domain Connect verification. Here are instructions on these…

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