Bing Reveals Secrets of Content Quality in It's Ranking Algorithm

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I was browsing some old documents on content quality when I found Bing search quality insights blog has an interesting post completely focused on what Bing considers in terms of content quality before ranking web documents. This is really a great effort from Bing to educate the webmasters regarding the quality of content that they should have on their site and I really appreciate it. Google had earlier provided some information on content and site quality in it’s EAT factor. Information like these is indeed useful for the audience and webmasters both. I will break down the major components here and compare both what Google and Bing suggests. I personally feel, creating content based on the factors discussed below will help your site to gain rankings both in Google and Bing.

The ‘AUP’ Factor in Content Quality

Content quality is mainly judged on the basis of 3 factors. I will name it as the ‘AUP’ factor. The AUP factor consists of Authority, Utility and Presentation.

Authority

If someone searches with a query “healthy eating during pregnancy”, what results are you expecting as an end user? You will love to see results from authoritative websites, right? something that you can trust. Search engines have special trust algorithm that determines the trust factor associated with the content, its author, or the website. In addition to this, a variety of factors are used to establish and determine the authority of a page. These include signals from social networks, cited sources, name recognition and the author’s identity.

If we compare the search results returned by Google and Bing then both are more or less the same. Sites like mayoclinic, nhs, babycenter and webmd are trusted by both Google and Bing. So, what are those trust factors that are working for these websites?

Bing and Google both generate a content quality score based on a number of factors. The content quality value is determined by comparing a web page to patterns found in known low-quality web pages such as parked web pages, content farm web pages, and/or link farm web pages. The presence or absence of each pattern can have a corresponding effect on the content quality value.

Negative Signals That Reduce the Content Quality Score

Duplicated content
Inaccurate or nonsense content
Spelling and grammatical mistakes
Having a lot of ads on the site that distract the audience
Making the user read through a lot of content before he finds the actual content he is looking for
Use of overly large pictures that do not add value
Rewording existing content from other sites
Using commonly known facts, for example, “Lion is an animal. Lion lives in a Jungle. Lion is the king of the jungle ”
Linking to low quality sites

A tip: You can compare the site contents of your competitors to find the texts they are using in their content. For instance, tools like Draftable offer two word documents comparison.

Utility

Is the content sufficiently useful for the topic it is trying to address? The utility factor addresses the issue of supporting ample information a web page. The level of depth and the presence of supporting multimedia content: instructional videos, images, graphs, etc. are all covered under this factor.

Presence of unique content is always preferred in place of recycled, low quality or duplicate content. Bing even discloses one of the ranking factors by publicly saying “A great example of this are real estate listing sites. These sites generally syndicate information available elsewhere (via MLS or government sources). However, even these kinds of sites can move up in the ranking results if they set themselves apart with unique value that others in that category may not have, such as school information or nearby transportation options.”

See Also: 7 Types of Content You Must Avoid in Your Site
How to Create User Intent Based Content

Presentation

An easy to read page, having well presented menu, proper internal links, accessible design and the primary content easy to find are some of the basics of effective presentation of content which the search engines consider before ranking any web page.

Bing said “It will promote and support websites and webmasters that provide ads relevant to the content of their website and place ads so that they do not interfere with the user experience.”

Examples of Low Quality Content Pages

Here are some examples of low quality pages which will find hard to rank itself in the search engines:

The page below displays a lot of ads and also the author information is missing. So, from authority, utility and presentation point of view, this page just sucks!

Formula for Judging the Content Quality

In Bing, the relevance of a result is a function of:

Topical relevance to the query (“Does it address the query?”)
Content Quality (as measured by the AUP factor), and
Context (“Is the query about a recent topic?”, “What’s the user’s physical location?” etc…)

Ranking= f (topical relevance, context, content quality)

Improving the content quality on your site is just one of the easiest ways through which you can help the search engines find more useful content for the users. For all those SEO folks, looking to increase rankings of their website, try the cocktail of EAT + AUP factor and I am sure you will get to see some good results.

Also See:

Understanding Google’s Page Layout Algorithm
Google Indepth Articles
Quoted Search Results
Importance of Content for SEO
How to Make Your Website More User Friendly
Step by Step Seo Copywriting Guide
Seo Tutorial
5 Tools to Make Your Site Content Hummingbird Friendly
Seo Guide for Schema Vocabulary
Rich Snippets in Google
5 Ways to Boost SEO by Leveraging Google Brandvantage
Ways to Increase TrustRank
How Google Identifies Entities Using Attributes
Trust Button and Persona Pages
How Google Uses Contextual Search Terms
Taxonomic Classification to Find Real Context of Words

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Bing Reveals Secrets of Content Quality in It’s Ranking Algorithm

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Joydeep Bhattacharya