Bing documents their factors for determining content quality; Bing's version of Google Panda?
Michael Basilyan, Senior Program Manager from the Bing Content Quality Team, shared a nice set of details on the Bing blog about how Bing’s algorithms determine what makes for content quality.
Michael Basilyan explained that content quality is a primary factor in their ranking algorithm, along with topical relevance and context. Michael then went on to explain that content quality is made up of three primary factors, authority, utility and presentation.
Bing defines authority as if they can trust the content. How do they know if they can trust the content? It is not just about the links pointing to the page but also about how established the web site and web page is. In addition, Bing looks at signals from social networks to see if the author is well cited, recognized and an authority in the space. They also explain that how they determine authority changes by query segment, where health authorities need professional documents written about the authority.
This is about determining if the page written is useful and detailed enough to the searcher for them to accomplish their task. Does the page have enough supporting citations. Is it detailed enough for the typical searcher. Bing also prefers to see videos, images and graphs on the page – those are signals of utility and content quality.
Bing then shares some examples of the above.
For those who deal with Google Panda, a lot of this may sound very familiar.