Bing Talks Mobile
There's no denying that mobile search is here for the long haul. What has been changing over the past few years are how sites and search engines respond to mobile traffic. Bing released a blog post outlining some of the key ranking factors they utilize in determining what mobile results are the most relevant and it pretty much boils to down to user experience. Whether your site is responsive or mobile specific, Bing wants to make sure that their results for mobile search users lead to sites that are easily navigated. They provided the following factors as examples of what they consider to determine relevance:
- We identify and classify mobile and device-friendly web pages and websites
- We analyze web documents from a mobile point-of-view by looking at: Content compatibility, Content readability, Mobile functionality (to weed out 'junk', that is pages that are 404 on mobile or Flash only etc.)
- Return more mobile-friendly URLs to the mobile SERP
- Ranking the results pages based on all of the above
You can read their full blog post here.
To aid in their ranking of mobile results, Bing also announced a new set of crawlers specifically aimed at mimicking the search experience for common mobile devices. In their announcement Bing offered the examples below to show the format the user agent string will generally follow.
- Mozilla/5.0 + (Mobile Device) + Mobile Engine + Mobile Browser + bingbot/BingPreview/[version]
- Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b
They also state that the crawlers themselves are able to preview the pages just as a user would so it's important to allow the crawlers access to all of your content including CSS, script, and image files. You can see a few more examples and read their full announcement on the new device-specific crawlers
