People are always going on about how SEO is important
for their rankings, how marketing will popularize their blog, how
important updating your blog regularly is, and so on. But the most
important of all would have to be the content.
Quality content
will make or break your site, and at the core if it all, it's content
that makes your blog successful. We've talked about how Google looks at
quality content. Let's look at another perspective, and see what Bing
has to say about quality content.
These insights
come from Michael Basilyan, Senior Program Manager from the Bing
Content Quality Team who posted on the Bing Blog about how Bing's
algorithms determine what makes for content quality.
Content quality is obviously a primary factor in Bing ranking
algorithms, along with topical relevance and context. Content quality
can be thought of as comprising three primary factors; authority,
utility and presentation.
Authority
Can we trust this content? Bing defines authority as if they can
trust the content. How do they know if they can trust the content? It is
not just about the links pointing to the page but also about how
established the web site and web page is.
In addition, Bing looks at signals from social networks to see if the
author is well cited, recognized and an authority in the space. They
also explain that how they determine authority changes by query segment,
where health authorities need professional documents written about the
authority.
Utility
Is the content useful? This is about determining if the page
written is useful and detailed enough to the searcher for them to
accomplish their task. Does the page have enough supporting citations.
Is it detailed enough for the typical searcher. Bing also prefers to see
videos, images and graphs on the page – those are signals of utility
and content quality.
A factor that may harm the content quality is repurposed or “recycled”
content. They want pages that are the source of that data or do unique
things with the data, not just pages that recycle the content from the
source.
Presentation
Is the content well presented? This is about making sure the
content on the page is easy to find and easy to read. If you have ads in
the way, distracting and unrelated ads or the content is hard to find,
this can hurt your content quality score. Bing says they will go as far
as to “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.”
You will note that Google's Panda algorithm isn't very different from
this. This goes on to show that search engines want one thing and one
thing alone - quality content. It doesn't matter what search engine
you're targetting - the basics remain the same.