Have you been stuffing your URLs full of keywords? Well, STOP! Bing has just released a new spam filter that kicks websites out the index when they stuff their URLs full of terms.
According to Bing, this filter was actually applied a few months ago, but they are just telling us about it now.
Igor Rondel, a big player in Bing search, wrote a blog that stated this update would impact about 3% of Bing queries. Igor noted this filter will keyword stuffing, but also a few other items. See the full list here.
- Multiple hosts, with keyword-rich hostnames: https://account.free.online.savings.samedaypaydayloansusa.com
- Host/ domain names with repeating keywords: https://loan.payday.paydayloanspaydayloansusa.com
- URL cluster across same domain, but varied hostnames comprised of keyword permutations
- https://contososhoeswomen.shoesonsale.com/
- https://bestwomensrunningsneakers.shoesonsale.com/
- https://discountrunningapparelforwomen.shoesonsale.com/
- URL squatting
- This is a little different as the spammer is playing on a human tendency to misspell keywords & in effect syphoning traffic off of existing (typically high profile/ traffic) sites
- E.g. https://nytime.com (misspelling of https://nytimes.com), https://ebey.com (misspelling of https://ebay.com)
Bing and URL Keyword Stuffing Specifics
Bing noted that they would be looking at a variety of factors in accordance with applying the spam filter. Some of those are the size of the website, number of hosts, number of words in the host name, number of keyword occurrences and quality signals stemming from the website content.
Bing made it clear that this will impact 3% of searches, or about 130 million URLs.
Source
- Bing Released A URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filtering That Impacted Three-Percent Of Queries, Barry Schwartz. SEL. 9-10-14
