Phishing site warnings

The trick to fishing is making the fly float through the air as if it were alive. Done right and the hungry trout eyeballing the fly is convinced to take the bait. It is not a coincidence that criminal activity shares a similar name: phishing. The bait are fake websites designed to look and feel like the legitimate ones. These sites catch people by taking advantage of a user’s trust in entering information such as passwords, usernames, and credit cards.

Bing has refined the generic warning to specifically call out this threat. When users click a URL suspected of phishing, a warning will appear. This looks similar to the generic warning except it now warns that the site might steal personal information.

Webmasters still get notified through the dashboard, and they can then ask for a review after performing the cleanup.

Sites that link to malware

Sites might not always be malicious; however, they might link to malicious binaries. While safe to load into the browser, there is a hidden bomb waiting to be clicked. In contrast, some hacked pages cause infections just by visiting them. The generic warning is now refined to specifically call out pages (likely) safe to visit as long as links are not clicked.

This refined warning has a similar look and feel to the generic warning – the biggest change has been to the webmaster dashboard page. 


The webmaster dashboard shows which binaries are causing the warning. As such, removing the harmful links leads to the warning being removed.

Clicking (View), under Additional Details, displays the path to the malicious binaries.



Sites with warnings are not always bad actors

We understand that sites with warnings are not always bad actors. Websites are vulnerable to being hacked, and webmasters are vulnerable to being tricked, just like any other customer. By refining our generic malware warning, our hope is that users are more informed and webmasters are able to clean their sites more efficiently.
 
Chad Foster                         
Bing Program Manager

If you have a website and want to be recognized in the search engines, then you absolutely need a sitemap.  If your site does not have a sitemap, then you run the high risk of not being indexed appropriately in the search engines.  Well managed sitemaps greatly increase Bing’s ability to locate, access and index all of the relevant URLs on your website.  When creating a sitemap, you can refer to our sitemaps best practices article, particularly helpful for large sites.
 
The first question we ask when communicating with a website is, “Do you list all your relevant URLs in your sitemap?”  Telling us how many URLs you think you have is not enough.  Be sure to tell the search engines where your sitemap is located by listing it via robots.txt or via Bing Webmaster tools to promote getting listed on Bing.

2 - Avoid Stalled Sitemaps

Often times, site owners make aesthetic changes to their sites, but forget to update the URLs in their sitemap.  Too often, Bing discovers stalled sitemaps which have the same URLs listed for months – sometimes years – even when the website keeps changing.  This is frequently due to broken or unmonitored processes for updating your sitemap, switching to a new Content Management System or simply forgetting to stop referring to the previous sitemaps.
 
As a SEO best practice, you should regularly verify that the sitemaps referred to in your robots.txt and Webmaster tools are the appropriate ones, and ensure the sitemap content only lists the relevant URLs posted on your site.  Your sitemap should ideally be automatically generated at least once a day. Complimentary to sitemaps, you should also have real time RSS feeds to tell Bing about all of your​​ fresh URLs which enables Bing to discover new URLs in a matter of minutes rather than up to 24 hours.

3 – Test Your Sitemap with the “View Source” Feature

Be sure to pay attention to how your URLs are encoded and follow protocol guidelines. We see lots of ampersand characters not encoded (invalid XML files) or encoded twice (looks like this &).  As a trick, view your sitemap in your favorite browser by using the browser “View Source” feature.  This will show you the sitemap that the search engines see.  Your browser default web windows may decode the URLs listed in your sitemaps and URLs may look fine without being fine.

4 – Use Sitemaps Attributes Values Correctly

Bing is constantly monitoring and adapting to benefits from URL signals, including sitemaps attributes values.  As a best practice, do not output any of these attributes in your sitemaps if you are not able to set the appropriate values.  For instance, do not set the <lastmod> value set to the time you generate the sitemap.  <lastmod> should be the date of the last modification of the content linked from your sitemap.  Be sure to follow the protocol - <lastmod> values must be in the W3C Datetime.  If you don’t know how to generate this format, use YYYY-MM-DD. Do not use a country specific format. And avoid setting <changefreq> and <priority> attribute values to the same values if you don’t really know when the content will change and will not be able to differentiate priority between URLs.  
  
We encourage you to visit Bing Webmaster tools regularly to get the latest information and data about your site.  And remember, you don’t need to log into Bing Webmaster tools and publish your sitemaps each time you generate them.  Instead, refer your sitemaps once in your robots.txt or in Bing Webmaster tools and we will process them regularly.

As always, we would love to hear your ideas and feedback! So do let us know your thoughts at Bing Listens.
  
Fabrice Canel
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft - Bing

– Vincent Wehren – Senior Product Lead Bing Webmaster & Publisher Experiences

In our earlier post about our approach to mobile-friendly search, we talked about some of the factors that our algorithm takes into account to determine whether a page is considered “mobile friendly” such as readability and navigation. Today, we are happy to announce the general availability of the Bing Mobile Friendliness Test Tool and also would like to dive a little deeper into the more specific factors that determine mobile friendliness and provide more understanding how these factors impact your site. You can find the Bing Mobile Friendliness Test Tool in Bing Webmaster Tools under Tools & Diagnostics or navigate to it directly using this link.

How is a Page Determined to be Mobile Friendly?

When evaluating a webpage for mobile friendliness, the following key factors are considered:

• Viewport and Zoom control configuration
• Width of page content
• Readability of text on the page
• Spacing of links and other elements on the page
• Use of incompatible plug-ins

The Mobile Friendliness Test tool runs checks on all of these key factors and additionally checks for and reports on resources that are needed to analyze the page fully but that we weren’t able to crawl due to robots.txt constraints. This way rendering issues (as seen in the page preview) can be fixed by webmasters by updating robots.txt in such a way that Bing can accurately determine the mobile-friendliness of the sites.

When you submit the URL of a page to be analyzed to the Mobile Friendliness Test tool, our Bing Mobile crawler fetches and renders the page, extracting important features that are used by the tool to determine how the page performs against each of the above factors. The outcomes are then aggregated into a consolidated mobile-friendliness verdict for the page.

A sample result for a page that meets all mobile-friendliness checks might look like this:

On the other hand, when a page fails to meet one of these criteria, the verdict provides detailed information on the failure (see the example below). A preview snapshot of what the page looks like on a mobile device is also shown, along with pointers which can be used to identify what needs to be fixed.

Let us jump in and see what these checks mean and how you can ensure your page passes all of them.

Viewport

The Viewport meta tag needs to be set correctly in order for mobile-friendly pages to work well on devices of different sizes and orientations. In general, this means that the viewport is set with the content width equal to “device-width” as show below.

<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

While it is possible for pages with an alternate viewport configuration to be mobile-friendly on certain devices, they might not work equally well on all devices. In the example below, the Viewport configuration check failed, so even though some checks passed, the page is flagged as not being ready for mobile experiences:

Zoom Control

The Zoom Control check verifies if the configuration of the viewport hampers the user’s ability to pinch and zoom the page. In general, not using the scale-related viewport settings should result in your page being zoomable on most mobile browsers, but improper use of these settings (user-scalable, maximum-scale, minimum-scale) could result in hampering access to some content on the page. Some mobile-friendly pages prevent user zoom by design and we do take that into account before flagging it as an error.

Content Width

One of the more important signals we use in determining the overall mobile-friendliness verdict is the page’s content width and how it relates to the device’s screen width. In general, the content width should not exceed the screen width. We have some tolerance built in, but any page that requires excessive horizontal panning will get flagged for the error “Page content does not fit device width“.

Readability of Text on the Page

Another important factor is the readability of text on the page. The readability factor was determined after analyzing hundreds of thousands of pages (mobile-friendly and otherwise) to determine appropriate features and thresholds. In any case, it is important to understand that readability is not just a function of font size, but also viewport scaling. It is useful to think of readability as the average area occupied by text when the page is fully zoomed out to fit the device width.

Spacing of links and other elements on the page

With regards to touch-friendliness we have a similar approach: we look at all input elements and hyperlinks on the page to see if they occupy an area considered “tap-friendly” at maximum zoom out. If that is not the case, we will call out that “Links and tap targets are too small“.

Compatibility Issues

Resources Blocked by Robots.Txt

While the factors discussed above impact the mobile-friendliness verdict of the page, the tool also validates a couple of other related factors. For example, the tool checks for page resources blocked due to robots.txt rules and reports instances thereof as warnings. Possible rendering issues could be due to these blocked resources, so armed with this information, you can look into updating your robots.txt so that Bing can accurately determine the mobile-friendliness of your site pages.

Parting Words

The Mobile Friendliness Test tool is yet another important step in our commitment to help site owners create mobile-friendly experiences. We hope it greatly aids you in making your website mobile-friendly. Each time you run the tool against a URL, we crawl the page the same way Bingbot does, download necessary and allowed resources, dynamically render the mobile page, extract features and run it through our mobile classification algorithms to produce the verdict for your page. Since all of this happens in real time, it might take the tool a few seconds to complete processing and show results. For any issues reported that have quick fixes (like robots.txt changes or viewport tag updates), or when you are actively working on making your website mobile-friendly, you could re-run the tool to immediately see the outcome.

As always, we would love to hear your ideas and feedback! So do let us know your thoughts at Bing Listens.

Happy mobile-friendly testing!

Charu Puhazholi – Senior Program Manager, Webmaster Tools
Shyam Jayasankar – Program Manager II, Mobile Ranking

Saying goodbye is never easy, but the time has come to do just that with a member of the Bing Webmaster Tools family: starting October 1st, 2015 we are shutting down Link Explorer.

Why say goodbye?

Link Explorer has been part of Webmaster Tools since the June 2012 release (called “Phoenix”) and provided an easy way to see a sample of links pointing to a given site — not just your own — making it a simple competitive link analysis tool.

In the backend the tool made use of special query operators that allowed us to search the index for link information at query time. However, as the size of the Bing index has grown many times over since 2012, and as the architecture of our index has evolved to improve speed and efficiency, we no longer will have access to this information at query time going forward. As a result, we will no longer be able to power Link Explorer inside Webmaster Tools.

So what about my own links?

Looking at usage patterns, Link Explorer was often misunderstood in that people were looking for the inbound links pointing to their own site in Link Explorer. However, Link Explorer offered only a small sample of these links. The real power tool to get the most comprehensive data about links pointing to your own site remains the Inbound Links tool accessible from the Reports & Data Section. It offers viewing and export of up to a million inbound links at once, shows up to 20,000 inbound links per page and includes not only the link source but also the anchor text of the inbound link.

Parting Words

Saying goodbye to a nifty tool like Link Explorer is not easy, but sometimes it is necessary to let go. With the unparalleled power of the Inbound Links tool still at your disposal to view your own links and with various third party tools that provide even more comprehensive competitive link analysis data in the market today, we feel you’re still in the best position to succeed in Bing and Bing-powered search.

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Bing

Data feeds are the best way to influence how your content is presented in search results. For example, providing item purchase data enables the recently announced Places to Buy experience (learn more) for your image. Data feeds enable rapid awareness of new and changed content, ensuring search results linking to your site are up-to-date. They also offer the flexibility to expose metadata not within your page HTML. These all help generate more traffic volume.

It’s Easy To Setup A Feed

Bing is able to pull data directly from your servers. We accept 2 types of feeds for simplicity:

1. Direct data file: Object metadata is tied to page and image URLs and presented in data files. This type may be a sitemap or a more robust data feed.
2. 2-step data sharing: A sitemap is first shared to list all the page URLs that contain images.  Bing then uses the URLs to query a specified metadata endpoint (OEmbed, RSS, etc) to retrieve comprehensive metadata.

We offer flexibility on feed and schema formats:

• Format: JSON (preferred), XML
• Schemas:
  • Bing Image (preferred)
  • Google Product Feed
  • Google Image Sitemap
  • Yahoo MediaRSS
  • Pinterest Rich Pins

The Bing Image data feed schema is based on schema.org.  The more metadata provided in the data feed, the richer the experience we can enable.

How do I start?

Please contact us to discuss more details such as scheduling, metadata richness, validation, and more.

As a tip, when creating a sitemap, adding an indication of importance can be very helpful.  For example, a webmaster can split sitemaps by activity where heavily trafficked URLs are included in frequently updated sitemap1 while less active URLs are in a separate sitemap2.  This helps Bing understand which URLs it should prioritize crawling first.

We will continue to evolve our data feed ingestion system. We value your feedback on how we can make this process easier and use your content to drive high quality referral traffic. We look forward to hearing from you.

– The Bing Image Search team

​

That’s why we support the industry’s move to use of TLS protocols as part of our effort to expand encryption across our networks and services. Bing has already been offering users the option to encrypt search traffic for about a year and a half now. Beginning this summer, we will begin the process of encrypting search traffic by default. This means that traffic originating from Bing will increasingly come from https://www.bing.com as opposed to http://www.bing.com.

With the move to encrypted search by default we will continue to pass along a referrer string so that marketers and webmasters will be able to identify traffic as coming from Bing. However, to further protect our users’ privacy, we will not include the used query terms.  We will still provide some limited query term data available without compromising the security of customer data through our various webmaster and advertiser tools, which include:

1. Use Search Query Terms Report. Available in the Bing Ads UI or through the API, the Search Query Terms Report lets you see what search queries triggered your ads and the associated performance metrics such as clicks, impressions and conversions.
2. Adopt Universal Event Tracking. Universal Event Tracking can provide enhanced performance metrics (e.g. bounce rates, duration per visit, pages per visit and total visits) associated to the query and keywords you bid on so you can better understand conversion performance. For advertisers, Universal Event Tracking is also the foundation to allow for Remarketing in Paid Search (currently in pilot).
3. Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools. Take advantage of Bing Webmaster tools as we will maintain keyword and ranking data inside the tools. With Bing Webmaster Tools you can be sure your site gets indexed in Bing, get access to research tools and reports that can help your search ranking and help you understand what led people to your website.

Microsoft has a long-history and deep commitment to helping protect our customers’ data and the security of their systems.  While this change may impact marketers and webmasters, we believe that providing a more secure search experience for our users is important. With this change, you will still be able to see Bing as the origin (referrer) of the encrypted traffic, though analytics tools you are using to analyze your traffic generally have their own, proprietary way of including this information in their search reports.

For our marketers and webmasters who utilize query data passed through the Bing referrer, be sure to explore the tools referenced above to help you optimize and understand search traffic to your website.

Duane Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing

At first, you may ask yourself: how do I apply my SEO chops to apps? How can I as the web search person help drive app installs through search? Isn’t the app world all about app developer? And your app developer may be thinking “how can the web search folks help me”? Could it be there is a place where these worlds meet? There is, and it’s called App Linking!

App Linking for App Content Discovery

When you think about finding apps on the web, you think about the pure app discovery by searching for an app name or maybe an app category. However, a much more natural and common way for people to search is for content. And of course that content can live inside an app. But in contrast to websites – which generally are easily accessible, crawlable, and indexable for people to search and find, apps appear to the search engines as walled gardens that hide the rich content that lives inside them from searchers. And when it comes to the actions and tasks that an app can perform on that content, it becomes even harder: as it turns out the current app use model is far from perfect.

Today’s App Search Model

If you think about it, there’s probably a provider (an application or web site) for almost anything you want to do, be it on your phone, your tablet, or desktop PC. However, finding apps with the content you are looking for and the ability to fulfill the task you are trying to accomplish is often a process of trial and error. It requires trying individual apps and if there are multiple apps that do the same thing, it’s hard to know which app to use in the first place unless it’s one of the apps you use every day. So, wouldn’t it be awesome if someone could help inform the user’s choice?

A More Efficient Model

At Bing we believe there is a better way for searchers to find and interact with apps. A better way to engage with the content that lives inside of them, and the actions that they can take on it. One that better fits how people actually search and that helps them get things done more quickly. We also believe this to be a model that unlocks tremendous opportunity for app publishers — as many more of you will be able to compete in crowded categories where usually a handful of category leaders dominate.

To power this more efficient use model, Bing is expanding its Actions Intelligence to Bing and Bing-powered search (including Cortana) and building up a massive index of apps and app actions. And we are making it easy for you to participate in this new model, as you can use standardized markup on your website to help establish the link between your content and your app, as well as between your content entities and the actions your apps can perform on them.

To do this, Bing is leveraging two open standards and we want you to get ready to use them early on:

1. App Links and its simple markup to allow users to open your content with your apps straight from our web results and experience it in the immersive device experience instead of in the browser, and
2. Schema.org and its action vocabulary to help users discover your app by the actions that your app can perform on the content they are searching for

Let’s take a look at both.

App Links Markup for Deep Linking

Popularized by Facebook, App Links is an open standard for deep-linking into apps. It takes the well-known concept of the URL to create a relationship with a corresponding URI that points to the same content or activity inside an app.

To establish this relationship between the web URL and the app URI all you need is to markup the published web page with a set of simple <meta> tags in the <head> of your web page’s HTML. The format for these meta tags is:

<meta property="al:(platform):(property name)" content=(property value)"  />

So to map the example web address http://contoso.com/doc to a Contoso app which responds to the URI contoso://doc on for example iOS, you would add the following markup to the <head> section of your web page:

<meta property="al:ios:url" content="contoso://docs"  /> 
<meta property="al:ios:app_store_id" content="123456789" /> 
<meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="Contoso App" />

The following image offers a more elaborate example for a hypothetical web page that offers a player on the web as well as on Windows 10, iOS, and Android:

So now we have a regular URL that can be easily published, shared, and linked-to from the web, but when we crawl and index the web URL we not only find out about the content on the page, we also index this “web-address-to-app-address” relationship. As a result, we can show not just the web URL but also corresponding app deep link in our results.

This is great for users, because they can discover new apps and consume content within the immersive app experience which in most cases has access to much richer device capabilities than the web page in the browser. This is also great for app publishers, since the apps they publish now can be discovered not just for search by app name or app category, but also for terms that map to the content and entities they serve, which helps drive installs, engagement, and re-engagement.

App Links Markup Tester

To help you with testing and deploying this type of markup, we’ve added a new tool to our public webmaster tools area called Applinks Markup Tester.  This tool shows you exactly how we extract the App Links data from your page and performs some lightweight validation to help you get started:

Schema.org to Power App Actions

Establishing a link between apps and your content is not where it stops. More likely than not, searchers are trying to perform an action, complete a task using your app. So how can we establish the relationship between the content (entity), the task (action), and the provider (app) that can complete the task? The Bing intelligence platform is already pretty good at inferring some of this information based on its understanding of your site, but as always, being explicit about these things from the publisher side gives you an edge. Your tool of choice in this case: schema.org.

What is Schema.org?

You’ve likely already heard of schema.org and may already be using it to markup your webpages today. However, if you are unfamiliar with schema.org, it is a standard way for websites to markup webpages with structured data. It’s supported and furthered by the major search engines, including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex.  Schema.org was originally focused on describing entities: people, places, things. However in 2014 schema.org announced the Actions vocabulary — as we found that describing static entities simply wasn’t enough. And it’s the Actions vocabulary that you can use to not just describe the entity at a given web address, but also the actions that can be performed on it and the app or service that can perform the action.

An Example Scenario

Imagine the scenario where the user’s intent is to listen to an audiobook through their mobile phone during their drive home. The book (= the entity) is “Coraline” by the author Neil Gaiman. The action is “Listen”.

So to be able to rank an app URL for this query we would look for:

• The entity on the page
• The potential action that can be performed on this entity
• The app that can perform the potential action

You can use microdata to apply the schema.org actions vocabulary, but here’s what this would look like on your page expressed as schema.org in JSON/LD:

Expressing the relationship between entity, action, and your app using schema.org is a bit more involved than App Links markup, but it is extremely powerful in that it allows your web page as well as app to rank a whole new range of entity action-oriented queries. Naturally, your app developer needs to do also do some work to open the app with in the right location, and this work is usually specific to the platform or device. I dedicated a section of my App Discovery talk at Build 2015 to this very topic. The talk was geared towards enabling app deep linking and app actions on Windows 10 and Cortana. However, the applinks.org website has detailed instructions on the navigation protocol on iOS and Android as well and Bing is creating an app index that covers all of these platforms.

The Time to Start with App Linking & App Actions is Now

Now that we’ve seen how to apply app linking and app actions using markup, you may wonder when it is a good time to start to do this for you site. Well, we’ve already started analyzing the web specifically for App Links and actions markup to support the build up a massive index of apps and app actions, so the time start using app linking and schema.org actions and get an edge is now.

We’re also already in the process of bringing this apps and actions intelligence to Bing and Bing-powered search results including Cortana and Windows 10 and we will have more to share later. In fact, look for an upcoming post on how we will start applying this to our results soon.

Best (this time from London!)

Vincent Wehren – Product Lead Webmaster & Publisher Experiences

Mobile-friendly tag in search results

You might have noticed we recently started tagging search results as “Mobile-friendly”. This enables the user to skim through the search results to know which ones will quickly answer their information needs. Here is an example of how this tag appears on the search results page:

We received great feedback from this change in user experience showing that users strongly prefer pages marked with the mobile-friendly tag. Based on data from user’s interaction with Bing, we have seen that mobile users are able to satisfy their information needs much faster on searches that return more mobile-friendly results. With that in mind, we will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.

Ranking mobile-friendly webpages

Our approach to mobile friendliness as a ranking signal balances the need to improve the ranking for mobile-friendly pages, with the continued focus on delivering the most relevant results for a given query. This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly. While the changes will improve ranking for mobile-friendly pages, webpages that are highly relevant to the given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not get penalized. This is a fine balance and getting it right took a few iterations, but we believe we are now close. We expect to start rolling out mobile friendliness ranking changes in the coming months. In an effort to work hand in hand with our Webmasters and ensure a smooth transition to a mobile-first world, we will continue to share details on the roll-out of our mobile friendliness ranking technique through updates on this blog.

We have also been working on a tool that will allow Webmasters to analyze webpages using our mobile friendliness classifier and help them understand the results. This tool will become available in a few weeks from now and help Webmasters find and fix areas of their site that suffer from mobile friendliness issues. Understanding the factors that influence mobile friendliness will help serve our growing mobile user base much better.

Factors determining mobile friendliness

Over the past few months, we have been working diligently on improving our mobile friendliness detection algorithms. We can now tell with high precision if your webpages will render well on mobile devices or not. How do we know? We consider a number of different factors in making this determination. Some of the more important factors are detailed below:

1. Navigation – The menus, buttons and links on the page should be large enough and spaced well apart to aid touch-based navigation. In the example below, you can see the large, easy-to-tap and distinct navigational elements on the mobile-friendly page. In contrast, the page on the right has hyperlinks that are too close to each other and could be prone to accidental clicks from mobile users.

2. Readability – The text on the page should be readable without requiring zooming and lateral scrolling to access specific content. Keep in mind that readability is influenced both by font size and the viewport settings (defined in HTML tags). Here is an example of how readability impacts the mobile friendliness of the page:

3. Scrolling – The content of the web-page should fit within the device width. Vertical scrolling is considered acceptable, but the need to scroll horizontally hampers the ability to consume your content easily. Well-designed mobile pages typically fit well to the device width in both portrait and landscape orientations.

4. Compatibility – The content needs to be compatible with the device. For example, pages with flash content do not work well on iOS devices as discussed earlier in our November 2014 post. This also applies to videos that cannot be played on mobile devices due to plugin dependencies, copyright issues or distribution decisions made by the content owner. We check for hints in the content rendered on the page to determine if any compatibility issues exist.

Typically all the factors above will need to be met for a webpage to be considered mobile-friendly by our classification algorithm. There are more factors that we are considering along the lines of mobile friendliness, like the friction that pop-ups sometimes create in navigating to the core content of the page. One important thing to remember – we depend on access to all the necessary CSS and script files required by your page to make this determination. So, it is important that you allow Bingbot mobile user agents access to download these resources.

Let’s go mobile!

Our priority is delivering the best search experience for our customers, and we are committed to evolving Bing search to ensure that we are delivering the most relevant and helpful results. Mobile-friendly webpages are key to satisfying on-the-go information needs, so it is important to optimize sites for an increasingly mobile user base. We are very interested in hearing your thoughts on mobile friendliness and any feedback you may have on our plans. Join the conversation about mobile ranking – give us your feedback through the Bing Listens portal! Let’s go mobile!

On behalf of the Bing Mobile Relevance Team –

Shyam Jayasankar

We want to build a deeper relationship with webmasters to drive engaged customers to be inspired to learn and do more.

Why Bing Image Search?

Images are pervasive in search; over 1 billion image searches are performed every month by over 100M users on Bing.com and its search partners.  Relevant images are presented in many web searches and many billions of image results are presented across all devices and search partners every month.  As a webmaster, increasing your exposure on Bing Image Search will drive more high quality traffic to your site.

Driving Engaged Traffic

Image search engagement has grown significantly over the past few years. Users have discovered that image search is a powerful way to find more and do more. We’ve observed our customers wanting to complete tasks through image search such as purchasing a print of an image or the product in it, finding related items and learning more about it. We’ve evolved our image search experience to help our customers efficiently locate the best place to accomplish their search tasks.  Rich metadata from the source site is prominently showcased to help our users and drive traffic to the content providers. To learn more about our new experience please read more on the main Search Blog, and watch the announcement video below.

What should I do as a webmaster?

The first step to being a part of this experience is to get your structured data to Bing Image Search.  This can help increase your site’s visibility, Bing’s understanding of your content, and potentially drive more high quality traffic to your site.

An effective way to accomplish this is to ensure your pages are marked up with well-known schemas.  The open schemas we recommend include Schema.org and OpenGraph.  Microdata, Microformats, and RDFa are also supported.  When Bing crawlers fetch your page content, these schemas are utilized to understand your content along with the associated metadata to enrich our knowledge surrounding an image.  The more metadata provided with an image, the more likely we will surface your content.  Other than the typical popularity and descriptive elements, adding even more context such as if the image is related to a recipe or a product are especially useful.  For a few examples of structured markup, please see below.

Schema.org Product example (link)

<body data-page-type=”wcm” data-modules=”nord/page/product” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product” >
…
<div id=”product-image” >
<img src=”http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Large/9/_9606569.jpg” itemprop=”image” data-zoom-image=”http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Zoom/9/_9606569.jpg” data-gigantic-image=”http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Gigantic/9/_9606569.jpg” alt=”” />
…
</div>
…
<section id=”product-title” >
<h1 itemprop=”name”>Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt</h1>
</section>

You can also use meta tags with content attribute and no visible text rendered to user.

<!– Modified code sample to reflect schema.org –>
<title itemprop=”name”>Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt | Nordstrom</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Free shipping and returns on Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt at Nordstrom.com. A softly washed plaid cotton sport shirt in a trim, modern fit is classically styled with a button-down collar and chest pocket.” itemprop=”description” />

OpenGraph Product example (link)

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Large/9/_9606569.jpg” />
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Large/9/_9606569.jpg” />
<title>Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt | Nordstrom</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Free shipping and returns on Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt at Nordstrom.com. A softly washed plaid cotton sport shirt in a trim, modern fit is classically styled with a button-down collar and chest pocket.” />
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<meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Nordstrom” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://shop.nordstrom.com/s/nordstrom-trim-fit-washed-plaid-sport-shirt/3968654″ />
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt | Nordstrom” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Free shipping and returns on Nordstrom Trim Fit Washed Plaid Sport Shirt at Nordstrom.com. A softly washed plaid cotton sport shirt in a trim, modern fit is classically styled with a button-down collar and chest pocket.” />

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We also support the mediaRSS and PubSubHubbub feed formats. Direct feeds are preferred to allow us to have the most up-to-date and most comprehensive knowledge about your site.  Bing Image Search can then surface your content in a relevant and effective manner.  Please contact us directly using the email listed below to discuss logistics around sharing a feed.

In the future, please do not hesitate to contact us with your questions and feedback. We are eager to engage with  interested site owners, showcase your data in new and exciting search experiences, and help connect you with many more engaged customers!

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Why “Preview”?

The Track Certificates tool is currently offered as a “Preview” and here’s why: under the hood, Track Certificates uses telemetry data that was captured by the Microsoft Certificate Reputation system and is from browsers running on the upcoming Microsoft operating system Windows 10. Since Windows 10 is currently available as a Preview to the Windows Insider Program, the data collected is not yet as comprehensive as it will be once Windows 10 becomes available more broadly to the general public.  In addition, we still have some functionality to add (including items based on tool usage and your valuable feedback!).  However, once we are showing data for your site, it will be accurate and if you report a certificate as suspicious to Microsoft using the Report link, your report will be reviewed and actioned on, so make sure to not report valid certificates as fraudulent or suspicious!

So what does Track Certificates Show me?

You can find Track Certificates in a new Webmaster Tools section called “Security” (which going forward also contains the Malware Re-Evaluation tool). Once we have captured information about certificates that were requested by browsers visiting your site, it will be shown in the Track Certificates table as shown in the following screen capture:

Tracked Data

Here is an overview of the fields in Track Certificates that are available and their meaning:

• Host: the fully name of the server where our telemetry captured the certificate.
• Issued to: the name of the entity to which the certificate was issued.
• Issued by: the name of the entity that issued the certificate.
• First seen: date and time of the occasion on which we collected information about this certificate in our telemetry.
• Last seen: date and time of the last occasion on which we collected information about this certificate in our telemetry.
• Expiry date: the date on which the certificate will lose its validity.
• Download: a link that lets you download the certificate for closer inspection. Currently this is a X.509 certificate in binary DER format. (PKCS#7 is planned for a future release).
• Report to Microsoft: a link that lets you report the certificate to Microsoft in case it is fraudulent.

Please also see the help article for Track Certificates for more details. Also, if you are entirely new to certificates and want to know more, the CA/Browser forum website has some great information.

Give us Your Feedback!

We strongly feel that webmasters and site owners are the most qualified entities in helping to determine whether certificates that appeared for their sites are fraudulent or not. With Track Certificates, we allow webmasters and site owners to review certificates that were requested by browsers when accessing their site and to report them to Microsoft should they be suspicious. This helps websites and their users stay safe and protect sensitive information on the Web as a whole.

Although data may not yet be available for all sites during Preview, if your site uses SSL certificates, I encourage you to give the Track Certificates feature a try. I also encourage you to provide feedback directly in Webmaster Tools using the Submit Feedback tool, hit me up on Twitter, or let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Happy tracking &  the very best from Seattle!

Vincent Wehren — Senior Product Lead – Bing Webmaster & Publisher Experiences – @vincentwehren