Bing Reveals Secrets of Content Quality in It's Ranking Algorithm

Bing Reveals Secrets of Content Quality in It's Ranking Algorithm

I was browsing some old documents on content quality when I found Bing search quality
 insights blog has an interesting post completely focused on what Bing considers in terms of
 content quality before ranking web documents. This is really a great effort from Bing to educate
 the webmasters regarding the quality of content that they should have on their site
 and I really appreciate it. Google had earlier provided some information on content and site quality in it's 
EAT factor. Information like these is indeed useful for the audience and webmasters both.
 I will break down the major components here and compare both what Google and Bing suggests.
 I personally feel, creating content based on the factors discussed below will help your site to gain 
rankings both in Google and Bing.

The 'AUP' Factor in Content Quality 

Content quality is mainly judged on the basis of 3 factors. I will name it as the 'AUP' factor. 

The AUP factor consists of Authority, Utility andPresentation.

Authority 

If someone searches with a query "healthy eating during pregnancy", what results are you expecting
 as an end user? You will love to see results from authoritative websites, right? something that you can trust.
 Search engines have special trust algorithm that determines the trust factor associated with the content,
 its author, or the website. In addition to this, a variety of factors are used to establish and determine the

 authority of a page. These include signals from social networks, cited sources, name recognition
 and the author’s identity.If we compare the search results returned by Google and Bing then
 both are more or less the same. Sites like mayoclinic, nhs, babycenter and webmd are trusted
 by both Google and Bing. So, what are those trust factors that are working for these websites?

See Also - How Google Might Determine Site Quality Based on Phrase Model

Bing and Google both generate a content quality score based on a number of factors.
The content quality value is determined by comparing a web page to patterns found in known
 low-quality web pages such as parked web pages, content farm web pages, and/or link farm web pages.
The presence or absence of each pattern can have a corresponding effect on the content quality value.

Negative Signals That Reduce the Content Quality Score

• Duplicated content
• Inaccurate or nonsense content
• Spelling and grammatical mistakes
• Having a lot of ads on the site that distract the audience
• Making the user read through a lot of content before he finds the actual content he is looking for
• Use of overly large pictures that do not add value
• Rewording existing content from other sites
• Using commonly known facts, for example, “Lion is an animal. Lion lives in a Jungle.
•  Lion is the king of the jungle ”
• Linking to low quality sites

Utility

Is the content sufficiently useful for the topic it is trying to address?  The utility factor addresses
 the issue of supporting ample information a web page. The level of depth and the presence of
 supporting multimedia content: instructional videos, images, graphs, etc. are all covered under this factor.

Presence of unique content is always preferred in place of recycled, low quality or duplicate content.
Bing even discloses one of the ranking factors by publicly saying
"A great example of this are real estate listing sites. These sites generally syndicate information 
available elsewhere (via MLS or government sources). However, even these kinds of sites can 
move up in the ranking results if they set themselves apart with unique value that others 
in that category may not have, such as school information or nearby transportation options."

See Also: 7 Types of Content You Must Avoid in Your Site
                 How to Create User Intent Based Content

Presentation 

An easy to read page, having well presented menu, proper internal links, accessible design
and the primary content easy to find are some of the basics of effective presentation of content
which the search engines consider before ranking any web page.

Bing said "It will 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."

Examples of Low Quality Content Pages

Here are some examples of low quality pages which will find hard to rank itself in the search engines:

The page below displays a lot of ads and also the author information is missing. So, from authority,
 utility and presentation point of view, this page just sucks!

Formula for Judging the Content Quality

In Bing, the relevance of a result is a function of:

• Topical relevance to the query (“Does it address the query?”)
• Content Quality (as measured by the AUP factor), and
• Context (“Is the query about a recent topic?”, “What’s the user’s physical location?” etc…)

Ranking= f (topical relevance, context, content quality)

Improving the content quality on your site is just one of the easiest ways through which you can help the
 search engines find more useful content for the users. For all those SEO folks, looking to increase
rankings of their website, try the cocktail of EAT + AUP factor and I am sure you will get to see some
good results.