Bing Says Stop Stuffing Keywords or Else!

Top 10 Local SEO Things To AvoidThis month has seen some more significant changes in both Bing and Google. It wasn’t all that long ago when I remember having some monthly updates that basically said not much happened. We don’t seem to have those months anymore as the search engines, especially Google, keep changing things every month (sometimes weekly). No time to stop and rest or we’ll miss something.

In this month’s video, we’ll talk about Google and Bing’s latest algorithm updates as well as some big announcements Google made…one of which includes a certain aquatic fowl which is looming in the near future.

Full Transcript:

Hi,  I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.com, and this is your monthly SEO update, keeping you informed about what’s going on in the search engines.

Bing

Keyword Stuffing Not Allowed
We’re going to go ahead and start with Bing because they had an update to their algorithm, which doesn’t really happen that often with Bing, but we had one this month. What it is, is that Bing is now going after people who are keyword stuffing in URLs or in the web address of their pages. Basically what people were doing is that they would stick a whole bunch of keywords in the URL, making these really long URLs, or they would repeat the keywords over and over and over, trying to increase that ranking just a little bit by putting those keywords in there.

And Bing’s saying, “Stop doing that. We don’t want you doing that; we want you to rank naturally based off of the normal things, like getting natural links and shares and just doing a good job with the optimization of the page and things like that.” So, Bing is not going to give any kind of a boost for repeatedly using keywords in your URLs.

Create Natural Keywords
And in addition to that, if they see you consistently doing that, then you might get penalized. Now, it’s not bad to have a longer URL, because that happens naturally, especially on blogs. It’s also not bad to have a keyword in the URL. Just don’t go overboard on these things. Don’t shove keywords into it. Make it natural, make it make sense, and think about your users when you’re creating these web pages. Is this something that the user could remember?

This is something that Google had dealt with a long time ago. For them, it hasn’t really done much for you to use keywords in your URLs for a long time. But now Bing is also getting onboard with that.

Google

Ranking Boost to HTTPs Sites
Moving over to Google, speaking of them – Google has two updates that we need to talk about. The first is that they’ve said that they are giving a rankings boost to sites with HTTPS. That is the secure, encrypted website format. So if you’re taking payments or if you’re taking personal information that needs to be kept secure, that’s what HTTPS is supposed to help with.

Which brings up the question: what if you’re not doing that? What purpose is there, really, for turning your site to HTTPS? And the answer to that is, I have no idea. It really doesn’t help you. In fact, all it does is really slow your site down and make you have to pay for a service and get it all set up, which can be a hassle.

So if you are a site that is taking personal information or taking payments, then you should already have HTTPS, hopefully; if not, go ahead and do that. If you aren’t, then don’t really worry about it, because the reality is that we have not seen any kind of a significant impact on the rankings from this HTTPS update.

Benefit of HTTPs
What it appears to be is what’s known as a tie breaker. So if two pages are competing for rankings, and they both are equal in just about every other respect as far as ranking factors go, then Google’s going to look at the HTTPS, and that one’s going to win out. If there’s any difference in the ranking factors, then those other ranking factors are going to play more significantly into the rankings.

Just wanted to let you know about it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to try to get my site to be HTTPS, because it really isn’t going to be worth the hassle, unless you really do need to keep things secure.

Authorship is DEAD
The other update is that Google has announced that Authorship is dead, essentially. That the Google Authorship program, which they started about 3 years ago as a way to be able to identify the people creating content on the web, is no more. Basically, they found that only about 30% of people after 3 years had signed on and tried to implement things. There were a lot of mistakes, even within that 30%. So when you only have 30%, that’s a pretty poor ranking factor, so they weren’t able to do that. They tried to do it themselves with their algorithms, and that didn’t work either. So for now, they’ve kind of given up.

I wouldn’t remove anything from your site. I don’t think that Authorship is going to come back, per se, not in its current form – but it’s good to stay connected between Google+ and your content, because people who have you in their circles, they could still see a little bit of a rankings boost there for your content if they’re logged in to Google and doing a search.

I still do think that Google may try to come back to Authorship eventually, if they can find a solution for it, because I think that the promise of being able to identify who was creating content and whether they’re trusted people was something that Google really wanted to be able to do. But for now, it just isn’t working out.

Penguin Update Coming Soon
The last thing I’ll mention is that Google did give us a heads-up. They said that in the near future, in a reasonable amount of time, they are planning to do another Penguin update. Now, we don’t know what a “reasonable amount of time” is, or how near this future is, but just be aware that that is something that’s probably coming in the near future. And we’ll let you know what it does, because that’s what we do here, right?

So remember, we live in this internet age, so it’s important to stay strong in the search engines so that you can achieve your mission online, and we’re here to help you do that. God bless.

Share Your Thoughts:

  • What do you think of Google dropping Authorship?
  • Do you fear the upcoming Penguin update?  What do you think will happen when they release it?

27 Responses to “Bing Says Stop Stuffing Keywords or Else!”

  1. Both Google and Bing changes their algorithm to provide an quality result to their customers. that's what they both trying all sort of techniques to avoid spammy technique. Nice post and all the best.

  2. Google is the best among all of the search engines. Yes, Bing is trying to prevent spam but if they will not able to increase their users then they will not able to stay in this field in far future. Thanks

    • Thanks for your comment. Yeah, there's been a lot of chatter of the years of Microsoft dropping Bing, but they keep pushing forward. I think the reality is that even with a smaller share of the market, it still represents a significant amount of advertising dollars. Sure, they'd like their market share to grow, but I'm not sure it has to for Bing to be financially beneficial to Microsoft. And if it's financial beneficial, I don't see them shutting it down. Also, the Bing engine provides the backbone for several other search functions within Microsoft products.

      What would be interesting to me, though, is if Microsoft did close Bing, what would happen to Google in terms of anti-monopoly laws. Google would likely then control 80-90% of the market. I wonder if the gov would step in and force them to split.

  3. I pretty liked the clarity Bing showed in their algo change about keyword stuffing on their blog.
    As far as https:// is concerned, sited that have switched to secure SSL haven't experienced lot of growth due to the factor, may be in time this signal will be more powerful for websites to rank. Also I think SSL is more of a ranking signal for websites that has a payment gateway.
    Yes, authorship is dead, and I will say it is a good news for not so famous authors to get traffic from search engines.

    • Thanks for your comment. I like Bing sharing, too, but dealing with keyword stuffing seems like such old hat. While I think it's good to deal with, I also think it makes them look way behind the curve.

      • Yes, keyword stuffing is like a faded grey hat that old SEO tactics practitioner are not willing to change, and so SE are forcing them to take benefit from same. And to be very true, I am liking all these changes pretty much.

  4. Nowadays keyword based SEO cannot be benefited us a bit but we can benefit if we do SEO by targeting Brand name. Thanks

  5. It is really great blog

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  7. I personally think that what you do with Google, that goes the same with the other search engines. Google seems to hate any spam activity including this keyword stuffing. I just think that if you are trying to look good on Google, then you don't have to worry on other engines like Bing.

  8. It's all for the one as much on anything can do it all here. The same ways for the keywords to work.

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  9. Why not urls for keyword, dear bing 🙁 Its very practical, such urls have a high ctr.

  10. Nice information about search engines like Bing and Google

  11. It's beyond obvious that SEO is going to get harder and harder. The question is, is it moving in the right direction? Will it be so hard down the road to rank for something that it won't be worth it? Will it be cheaper to just pay for PPC for a website? I am starting to think so.

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  13. In the last decades, we see numerous changes made by search engines like Google and Bing. Both of these search engines, enhanced their security and give emphasize to use more natural words in their url’s. Sites which allow us with payment opportunity must contain the http protocol and http means that website is secure and protected.

  14. There's also talk now about Bing using Google's results as a guide to influence their own search results algorithm, which tells me that all the do's and don'ts with Google will be much the same and somewhat mirrored by Bing.

    Daniel – SEO consultant

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