Microsoft Introduces The SEO Tag: Empowering Webmasters To Rank Better

microsoft bing seo tag

microsoft bing seo tagSearch Engines look to rank good content well in hopes that the businesses producing valuable information receive the most traffic. However, since the beginning of search engines, SEOs have sought to decipher their underlying algorithms, some even abusing the system in an effort to get their content to rank higher. For decades, search engines like Google and Yahoo and the “black hat” SEOs have fought an epic battle re-positioning content every day as new algorithms and tools sweep through.

However, as time has progressed, search engines have become better at fighting spam issues and in the long run, the SEOs were no match. In most cases today though, most websites have been burned so many times trying to game the engines they’ve become complacent.

Microsoft’s take on the issue:

As time has progressed, we’ve been able to tackle spamming issues at many levels. In most cases today, most websites follow the known best practices and simply do the right thing. They’re too busy running a business to try trickery to rank better, trusting we will sort the rankings properly.

And now it’s time to reward that trust and your hard work.

So today Bing is announcing the creation and ongoing support of the SEO tag stating the following goals:

The goal behind this tag is two-fold:

First, as Bing has launched many new tools over the past year+ designed to help websites improve (Webmaster Tools, SEO Reports, Link Explorer, Bing Sitemap Plugin, Disavow Links, etc.), we’ve seen the positive feedback generated by this desire to partner with websites, instead of keeping them in the dark about important data by blocking it or not sharing it.

Second, and more importantly, you run the business, not us. So it’s time you take control of not just your SEO work, but of your rankings as well!

What is the SEO tag?

Starting today the SEO tag can be implemented to signal to the search engines where you should rank! All you do is place the following tags inside your code, simply fill in the blanks indicating which result your page should appear at, and the search engines will do the rest.

The second tag could prove quite useful too, allowing you to directly rank higher than your competition.

So you want to rank #1 in SEO or social media? Cool, just tell Bing what the deal is!

Upon launch Bing will recognize one “must_be_before” tag, but starting on April 1st, 2014, you’ll be able to stack up to 50 of them in your code to offer even greater coverage for your site! Also to make sure you follow these rules, Microsoft said:

To ensure compliance with this request, should you insert more than one “must_be_before” tag this year, we’ll simply contact your host and arrange for the server hosting your site to be put into a low-earth orbit for the following 365 days.

So what niche are you going to take over today?
 

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.

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