In a post on the Bing Webmaster Blog Bing has dug into how exactly they deal with keyword stuffing URLs. There are a few main signals that Bing looks out for when determining whether URL keyword stuffing tactics are in-use on a site:

  • Site size
  • Number of hosts
  • Number of words in host/ domain names and path
  • Host/ domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams)
  • % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords
  • Host/ domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g. [“year”, “event | product name”]
  • Site/page content quality & popularity signals

So what has changed in the SEO community since Bing kicked off this method of dealing with URL keyword stuffing?

  • Users: This update impacted ~3% of Bing queries (on average ~1 in 10 URLs was filtered out per impacted query.)
  • SEO community: ~5M sites, comprising > 130M urls, have been impacted, resulting in upwards of 75% reduction in traffic to these sites from Bing.
  • Examples of spam sites impacted:
    • www.cheapviagrausa.com
    • www.cheapviagrapharma.com
    • www.buyviagracheapviagraergr.com
    • www.gmailloginsigninup.com

Published by Michael Boguslavskiy

Michael Boguslavskiy is a full-stack developer & online presence consultant based out of New York City. He's been offering freelance marketing & development services for over a decade. He currently manages Rapid Purple - and online webmaster resources center; and Media Explode - a full service marketing agency.

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