Fabrice Canel Of Microsoft Bing On Indexing Quality

Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

Fabrice Canel is someone most of you who watch my videos know already, he has been with Microsoft for 26 years and is now the Principal Program Manager at Bing. He has been working on search since the very early days of MSN search, but even before that in 2001, he worked on internal search at Microsoft across many of the Microsoft properties, which was a big job. Then they used a lot of that technology in 2006 when they switched to MSN Search.

Fabrice is the man in charge of indexing at Bing. Fabrice said they discover 70 billion URLs per day (they said this before) but most of that is junk, so we spoke a bit about size (quantity) versus quality. Even with indexing so much every day, they cannot index everything, just like Google said.

We then dug into what quality is when it comes to indexing and how Bing decides what to crawl and index. He said much of the issue of Bing not indexing stuff is around what spammers create, but not all.

I did ask Fabrice what defines quality when it comes to indexing; he said, yes, links do help big time with discovery but he recommended we all read the Bing Webmaster Guidelines. In fact, the day we recorded, Bing updated its guidelines to include items around conversations mode and Bing Image Creator. In short, f follow the rules and you should be fine, especially if you have unique and useful content, Fabrice said. It is not just about internal Bing thoughts but, more importantly, about what outside users want, and they take that very seriously.

You can follow Fabrice Canel on Twitter @facan or on LinkedIn.