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The Bing Webmaster Center team is working hard to provide how-to's and guidelines to publishers looking to learn SEM. Their latest Webmaster blog entry includes detailed information on the syntax ideal for Bing optimization. Here are some of the highlights:


Canonicalize your home page URL
We've known for a while that search engines see www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com as different entities. If you don't stick with a uniform URL format, you risk splitting page rank value between the URL formats you do use. Saying this could potentially hurt your site would be an understatement.

Choose between relative vs absolute links
NOTE: This is probably the only section upon which I'll really expand because I felt certain portions required correction.

There really is no choice here. The Bing Webmaster team seems to be making it clear that you should be using absolute URL's for internal links if you want more link juice.

What this means:

• Use the full URL when linking. If your path doesn't include a http://www.<yoursitename>.<suffix>, it isn't absolute. The example given in the blog is incorrect. For measure, here are some additional examples:
  
  An absolute link:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.com/example/contactus.htm">Contact us</a>

  A relative link:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="contactus.htm">Contact us</a>

• Use proper URL syntax in the anchor tag
  
• Omit the default filename
  End URLs with folder name or /
  
  Examples to recap:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.org/index.shtml"></a> is bad

  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.org/"></a> is good

• For URLs that end with a folder and use dynamic parameters, use a ? then the parameter.
  
  Example to recap:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.org/default.aspx?var=1"></a> is good

  For URL's that are not default files for a folder, include them in the filename. Again, this just isn't allowed for default files.
  
  Example to recap:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.org/bing.shtml"></a> is good

  For URL's that include ampersands (&), use the equivalent escape code.
  
  Example to recap:
  
  HTML Code:

  <a href="http://www.netbuilders.org/default.aspx?var=1&amp;var=2"></a> is good

Additional tips include:

• Use title attribute anchor tags for internal links
  
• Identify the canonical URL for each page
  
• Minimize the number of parameters in dynamic URLs
  
• Avoid using session ID's or cookies -- because bots will fail to crawl your site
  
• Have at least one internal link to every page for easy indexing
  
• Limit the number of links on a page --unless you have really high quality links (implied).
  
• Prevent the bot from following a link by using rel="nofollow"

Bing Community

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