Bing's new webmaster guidelines list six main categories that Bing uses to rank your web pages:

1. Relevance

The content of your web page should match the intent behind the search query. If the web page contains the search term, and if the links that refer to the page also contain that search term, the page is relevant to Bing. Bing also considers synonyms or abbreviations that have the same meaning as the original search term.

Bing's new webmaster guidelines list six main categories that Bing uses to rank your web pages:

2. Quality and credibility

Bing evaluates page to determine the quality and credibility of these pages. That includes factors such as the reputation of the website and/or the author and the level of discourse (articles with citations and references to sources are considered higher quality that articles without sources). According to the guidelines, Bing might demote pages that contain offensive statements or derogatory language. The completeness of the content and transparency of authorship also have an impact.

3. User engagement

The interaction of users with the search results has an impact on the rankings. The number of clicks on a result, the time spent on the clicked pages and the number of people who return to Bing after clicking through to a page have an impact.

4. Freshness

Bing prefers content with up-to-date information. Some websites contain content that wills till be relevant years from now, other websites might have content that is going to be out of date quickly.

5. Location

The location of the user (country and city) has an impact on the rankings, as well as the language of the document and the location of other visitors of a web page.

6. Page load time

Many visitors will leave a website if it has a slow load time. For Bing, slow websites provide a poor user experience and an unsatisfactory search result. Webmasters should try to balance page load speed with a positive user experience.

"Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter that Google doesn’t want to penalize bad links anymore. Google’s algorithms simply ignore the bad links. [...]

'Penalizing' is so old school. It's more likely our algorithms become sentient and ignore them all while rolling their virtual eyes."

"It looks like the frequency of using the nofollow link attribute was 42% of the time, with 31.5% of the URLs listed having them. This is followed by bookmark at 15.4$ of the time with 9.7% of URLs with them. Tag was 14.2% of the time with 7% of the URLs with them."

Editor's note: You can check how other websites link to your website with this free link analysis tool.

"It seems Google prefers sites that specialise in a topic-area rather than generalists with this update. For example, scooter/bike sites now rank better for 'best scooter' than a general review or news site."

"Google is using automated methods in Google Shopping to double check the Google Merchant is not violating any Google Merchant/Shopping policies. One such policy is 'failure to clearly and conspicuously disclose the payment model and full expense that a user will bear before and after purchase.'"