Since Google constitutes over 2/3 of online searches, search engine optimization pros like us don’t spend a heck of a lot of time worrying about the other search engines.
Nevertheless, we do like to drop in from time to time and see what’s going on with Microsoft’s newest venture into the search world – Bing. It’s been almost a year since Bing hit the information superhighway and while it’s enjoyed some growth, it’s nowhere near taking over Google’s top position.
But one thing that will help SEOs understand how Bing works that was just released is an advanced query guide. This guide basically consists of advanced search operators webmasters can use in their site’s coding to help their rankings in the fledgling search engine.
One of the biggest advanced search operators Bing made public was the norelax operator, which automatically implements relaxcount for queries that are five words or longer. Basically what that means is any words past the fifth word in a query will not necessarily appear in the search results.
Other advanced search queries include: AND:, contains:, feed:, filetype:, language:, noalter:, URL: and more.
Check out this quick post on Microsoft’s technical site which includes a list and description for each search operator along with a quick forum on the topic from WebMasterWorld.