Bing comes up with a new spam penalty directed towards “inorganic web site construction” violations, the search engine proposed on Monday itself. This clearly shows that Bing is not in a mood to entertain such unsolicited messages sent over the internet! The brand new penalty seeks to fairly mete out with tactics involving subdomain leasing, doorway content and sites that participate in private blog networks.
R.I.P : A Place Where Your Website Meets It’s End
To bring out context for its new penalty, Bing supplied two examples of typical website boundaries.
Demarcation Of Website Boundaries: The first and the foremost boundary is outlined by the domain, in which each page, subfolder and subdomain are all seen as one- part of the same site.
In the second example, as shown below, every subdomain is seen as its personal web site.
Kindly Note: Demarcation of website boundaries, restrictions and limitations is particularly important to enable algorithms freely assign a different value to internal links than they do to external links.
“If your internal links are viewed as external, you can get a nice rank boost,” the blog post reads, “And if you can propagate some of the site-level signals to pages that don’t technically belong to your website, these pages can get an unfair advantage.”
Private Blog And Hyperlink Networks: There kind of scheme networks exist to handle search engines including Google and Yahoo. It artificially passes on hyperlink fairness to websites, so that these goal websites rank high above the other.
Violation Of Bing’s Link Policy: Engaging in private blog and hyperlink networks is already a violation of Bing’s link policy. “Going forward, it will be also in violation of our ‘inorganic site structure’ policy and may receive additional penalties,” the post reads.
Doorway And Duplicate Content: Bing noticed a spurt in trend involving bad actors for giving rise to dozens of doorway sites and try to rank for different keyword sets. Frédéric Dubut, web ranking and quality project manager for Bing, recently told Search Engine Land. As illustrated below, these doorways, which are designed to look like several independent sites, redirect to the same destination, deceiving users who click through.
Banishing Duplicate Content Completely: Since duplicate is a habitual occurence, Bing will be assessing the behind the scenes- intention of such content before designating it a violation of its inorganic site structure policy.
Subdomain Or Subfolder Leasing: The rule concerning- leasing a subdomain to a different entity makes it difficult to discern how involved the main domain owner is, thus making it nearly impossible to tell whether the subdomain should be considered part of main site.
Becoming incapable and insufficient to easily access, directly navigate between the main site and the subdomain was a commonality between the cases Bing reviewed. “Therefore, the intent was clearly to benefit from site-level signals, even though the content on the subdomain had very little to do with the content on the rest of the domain,” the post reads.
Bing admitted that some feel that permitting a third party to rent and operate a subdomain to be a legitimate way to monetize a website.
“However, in this case the practice equates to buying ranking signals, which is not much different from buying links. Therefore, we decided to consider ‘subdomain leasing’ a violation of our ‘inorganic site structure’ policy when it is clearly used to bring a completely unrelated third-party service into the website boundary, for the sole purpose of leaking site-level signals to that service.”
For the majority of subdomain leasing cases, the penalty would be confined to the leased subdomain and not the root domain.
Why We Care?
The violations aforementioned may appear like ‘tempting shortcuts’ and apparently, enough site owners have resorted to them as to warrant a new penalty. Regardless of what new, questionable tactic you come across, know that getting caught can fetch negative consequences for your organic visibility or may even result in delisting — and there’s no shortcut for safeguarding yourself from that.
As a site owner, you may also be held responsible for content being laid under your domain. “Taking an extreme case, if you offer free hosting on your subdomains and 95% of your subdomains are flagged as spam, we will expand penalties to the entire domain, even if the root website itself is not spam,” the post reads. Penalties may also be generalized for subfolders or subdirectories that Bing suspects have been hacked.
