We in the Bing Webmaster Center team are very fortunate to have such a bright, vibrant, and helpful community of users in our Webmaster Center forums . From time to time, I will take a moment to highlight some useful and interesting threads found in the forums. The goal of this new, periodically published blog column is multifold. First, I want to identify the Webmaster Center forums as a useful resource for webmasters and SEOs who have questions pertaining to Bing,

The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can't wait to share with you )patience, Grasshopper - all will be revealed in time(. But the blog waits for no one )well, that's the intent, anyway(. From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it's that time again. So let's get to it.

Microsoft Silverlight is a transformative technology. It enables otherwise basic websites to act as full-blown applications, provides access to state-of-the-art animation and video rich media presentations, and takes full advantage of your development team's existing experience in standard programming languages, such as C# . However, there is one little problem. Like competing rich Internet application )RIA( technologies that present images, animations, and videos,

When a key opens a lock, it typically provides the key's holder with a clear path to where he or she wants to go. Keywords and key phrases do the same for a website. They help direct searchers to content they wish to see on the Internet. But there is a key difference: whereas a lock key will typically match up with only one lock, keywords can lead a searcher down multiple paths to many matching, relevant websites.

When I was a kid in high school, I used to go to the public library and do initial research in the Encyclopedia Britannica )yes, the bound book editions. I also remember black & white television with vacuum tubes and rotary telephones! Sheesh, I'm getting old!(. I would pick up the index volume that contained the keyword I wanted to look up to identify which of the main volumes had the content I sought.

In the exciting world of today's Internet, where the world's information is literally at your fingertips, where you can endlessly communicate, shop, research, and be entertained, spam is a big downer. The unwanted email spam that fills our inboxes also consumes huge portions of the available bandwidth of our routers and trunk lines. But email is not the only spam game in town. Web spam is the bane )well, one of the banes( of the search engine and web searcher communities.

Just a quick note for today. While we've been busy working on the new series of web spam blog articles, we were also busy working on updating the recently compiled Webmaster Center FAQ )as described in the blog announcement New Webmaster Center FAQ available ( with even more content. While some might call it new and improved, I just claim that it's bigger with more information )hmmm - I guess it is new and improved!(.

What is spam? One could argue that spam is a multi-faceted thing. The word itself has many definitions. For example, it can be defined as a processed spiced ham and pork slathered with a gelatinous glaze food product found in a tin )it's apparently very popular in Hawai'i, don't you know?(. However,

Everybody loves a list of frequently asked questions )FAQ(. They often include tidbits of knowledge that are not easily found elsewhere, or present information in ways that often make it more understandable. The Webmaster Center team has been working hard to present more useful content through the team blog in recent months. We already have a FAQ of sorts through the Webmaster Center Help )see the Help system's left hand navigation for the Help-based FAQ(,

In August, we alerted webmasters to the news from the Microsoft Internet Information Services )IIS( team of the beta 1 release of their excellent new tool, the IIS SEO Toolkit. The public response we received was very enthusiastic and supportive. In response to many requests, we followed that up with a more detailed article explaining how the new tool is installed as an extension of IIS 7. Since that time, the tool was refreshed in a beta 2 release and, as of November 13,

We still get many questions in our blog comments, even though we try to encourage our readers to post their questions to our Webmaster Center forums )which are actually staffed to answer your questions!(. I do look through the blog comments every day and delete those that are junk )those that are empty, duplicated, offensive, and overtly spammy - see our Q&A reply on why blog comments are deleted in the 1st Webmaster Center blog Q&A post (.

In past SEM 101 articles, we've talked about the importance of inbound links to successful ranking )see "Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" - Part 1 and Part 2 (. We've already discussed many issues surrounding them, but we haven't done a dedicated post on how to be successful at link building from a search engine's perspective. Let's finally address that omission here and now. What is the point of building links? Your website is your self-representation on the Web.

Did you hear the news? Bing was recently upgraded with another set of exciting end-user features. Instead of reciting the long list of changes here, I'll just point you to the blog post in the Bing Search blog titled, " Bing's Next Chapter Begins Today ." The Bing engineering team has been focused on improving the already cool features that have made using Bing so much fun. One edit to the Bing home page has changed the way users navigate to the Toolbox page,

We've already covered in past blog articles some of the basics about how webmasters can use a file called robots.txt to control how search engine crawlers )aka bots( crawl their websites. But there is so much more to talk about with bots. So let's take a bit of a deeper dive into the subject. Topic 1: Using the proper text file encoding The robots.

The Bing team has been talking about its new crawler )aka bot(, MSNBot 2.0b, in this blog for quite some time now. We have made numerous improvements in its performance, addressed some webmaster concerns, and published detailed information on how to control the bot with a robots.txt file . Today we are announcing that the new bot is fully operational.

You've seen it. So have I. Nearly every person who has actively browsed the Web for more than 15 minutes has seen it. I'm talking about the dreaded 404 File Not Found error. When it occurs, users simply abandon their search on that site and go elsewhere. That's a potential lost sale, subscription, or download opportunity )aka conversion( for the affected site! It has been estimated that up to 10% of traffic on the Web is looking for pages that don't exist,

About eight months back , the Microsoft Research Translator team delivered an entirely unique way of delivering your website's pages to visitors who speak a different language with no development effort on your part. Unlike any other translation widget/gadget available at that time, the Translator widget was unique in that it kept your audience on your site, rather than redirecting them to a proxy translation service. Since then,

We've been really busy here at the Bing Webmaster Center blog team, pumping out new content on a regular basis to create a nice library of content on issues that matter to webmasters and online publishers . I thought I'd take a moment to catch my breath, pause on creating a new thematic article )or yet another multi-part series!( for SEM 101, and address some commonly asked questions in the blog comments. Q: Why wasn't my question in the blog comments answered? A: Well,

Is the economy ruining your vacation plans? Have you crossed fabulous destinations such as New York, Paris, and Tokyo off the list because theyre too pricey? Perhaps its time for a new strategy. In a new article on Bing Travel , Travel+Leisure suggests 15 destinations spanning the globe many of which may be new even to the most intrepid traveler that will stretch your dollar further. So what if the Euro costs too much? Eschew Tuscany and Burgundy for now,

OK, so I totally geeked out with my recommendations on how to better secure your webmaster computing environment. As a result, I had too much material for one post and thus had to split it up into two pieces. Let's wrap up this long series of posts on malware by finishing up with the last of the security recommendations. In Part 1 of this series on malware , we discussed how to detect a malware infection on your website using tools like Bing's Webmaster Center .