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Effective Strategies for Link Building on Bing and Google

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By Nate Nead

Search engine optimization (SEO) relies heavily on link building to boost a website’s ranking. While both Bing and Google employ link building as an effective SEO tool, their algorithms differ in the intensity with which they consider links when deciding page rankings.

Because of this, honing your link building strategies according to the specific search engines is essential for successful SEO efforts that yield long-term visibility online.

This primer will provide an introduction to the role of links for Bing and Google as well as explore specific strategies for building effective backlinks in each. From understanding link-based ranking factors to pinpointing the best practices for both engines, this article will provide you with essential information used by SEO professionals to propel pages up the SERPs.

Understanding Bing’s Link Building Factors

Source

Domain authority and relevance

When building strong links for Bing search, one key factor to consider is domain authority and relevance. Domain authority tells Bing how legitimate a link is – if the pages that link back to your site have higher quality content than yours, or are located in more relevant domains within the same field of expertise, those sites will send you stronger signals.

Relevance falls in line with this concept and is important because if your outbound links lead visitors away from topics pertaining to your niche it won’t be considered a “quality” link.

Additionally, having outgoing links leading to bad pages could create a penalty that lowers your rankings. To help build the perfect SEO strategy using domain authority and relevance, Bing Webmaster tools are useful in gathering important insights related to link building.

Quantity and quality of backlinks

Quantity and quality of backlinks are both integral components to successful link building strategies on Bing. The quantity of links shows how valuable the pages linked to are and indicates that many other websites recommend it.

Quality matter most to the search engine but must still be varied in order for a page or website’s SEO value to reach its full potential. This means linking out from unrelated industries, sources with strong domain authority, and using multiple anchor texts – all of which broaden the visibility of a website through showcasing its unique value.

Importance of anchor text

Anchor text is one of the most important link building factors for Bing’s search algorithm. Using relevant keywords in anchor texts helps to show the subject and context of the content that the user can expect when visiting a website from a link.

Bing places additional value in specific phrase matches, so exact matches to relevant target terms should be used wherever possible to optimize rankings on this platform. Compelling descriptions, but more general than an exact match, also help tell cues about what would be found when clicking through from a link.

Strategies for Building Links on Bing

Creating high-quality, relevant content

Source

Creating high-quality, relevant content is an essential link building strategy for Bing. Relevant and authoritative content not only builds trust and authority with visitors but likewise helps Bing’s algorithm recognize and credit your site accordingly. High-quality content ensures it ranks well on SERPs which encourages users to click through to the page more often.

Factors like bounce rates, time spent on pages, ROI etc play a vital role in determining higher search engine rankings, therefore, increasing traffic as a result of engaging copy is key when building links on Bing. Content should also be updated regularly and include keywords which as well add another layer of link value for SEO purposes.

Conducting outreach and guest posting

Conducting outreach and guest posting can be an effective strategy for building links on Bing. Reaching out to relevant, authoritative websites in your industry to secure backlinks to your content is key.

Having related topics and website material that follows the editorial guidelines of high-quality websites can increase chances of being featured as a guest contributor.

High-value features come with appropriate anchor texts in consistent link usage patterns, favourable placement within articles for increased prominence, and strategic internal linking—all important qualities thoughtfully considered by Bing’s linking algorithms.

Engaging in social media promotion

Engaging in social media promotion is an effective strategy for building links on Bing. Social signals such as likes, shares, retweets and mentions play an important role in boosting the visibility of content while helping to generate backlinks.

In order to make social media offer real value, it is essential to post quality material that adds relevance and engages audiences. The more people are interested in a website or brand’s content, the higher chance they have of sharing these resources which generates valuable backlinks.

Given that social media plays a part within Bing’s algorithm, including this as link-building strategy should be an integral factor in any SEO campaign.

Leveraging local directories and business listings

Leveraging local directories and business listings is an effective link building approach for Bing. When done strategically, claiming and optimizing profiles on music services and directory websites can be a powerful tool for improving search engine visibility, especially among geographically-specific audiences.

The key to getting the most out of this type of link building is determining which sites are favoured by the specific search algorithm rankings that you are looking to influence.

Get your brand listed with the top pertinent types relevant to your industry — not just Google My Business. Additionally, find smaller, niche-specific directories to better target potential customers.

Utilizing Bing Webmaster Tools for insights and optimization

Utilizing Bing Webmaster Tools for link building is an effective strategy to maximize the return on boosting SEO. The tools provide insights into both internal and external link structures, anchor text data, page authority, broken links and much more.

It reveals URLs of websites that are not indexing properly in terms of Google or third-party programs used for backlink auditing tools. Additionally, marketers may employ some tracking codes within the tool for optimization insight.

Most notably Webmaster Analytics shows how successful identification activities actually are. Proper implementation and data interpretation may result in winning the domain’s arrival into top SERP impact.

Understanding Google’s Link Building Factors

Source

Domain authority and PageRank

Google’s link building factor of domain authority assesses overall online trust in a given website, signifying relevance and quality. PageRank is Google’s proprietary measure of a websites’ importance; it uses the backlink structure between diverse sites to assign an approximate metric for each page. Linking to or from websites with higher PageRanks show increased SEO benefits due to being seen as valuable and authoritative by search engine algorithms.

Natural and diverse backlink profiles

When aiming to rank highly in Google, it is important to focus on building a natural and diverse backlink profiles. Search engines value websites that have overwhelmingly organic rather than artificial links pointing to their site’s pages.

Additionally, link profiles should be fragmented so that not all of the links are using the same anchor text or come from identical sources. Link diversity also applies when looking across main link types such as industry-specific directories as well as domain origins like (.gov, .org). Domain trustworthiness is another important factor for both Bing and Google search.

Importance of anchor text diversity

Anchor text diversity is an important factor that Google considers when evaluating links. This factor assigns a portion of a website’s relevance to the keywords used in linking sites or texts.

It’s best practice to use more than one keyword for anchor text in order to far more accurately depict what content it points toward and express its overall relevance better.

Too much repetition of anchor text can make search engine algorithms see links as less natural and manipulated, which can damage rankings if they observe the same phrases being emphasized over and over again.

By leveraging diversity within anchor texts to maximize rankings, websites can receive better link evaluation from both Bing and Google search engines.

Relevance and authority of linking domains

Google place a high importance on link relevance and authority, which means that links should primarily come from applicable sources within an industry or network.

They evaluate the quality of domains through similarities in top-level categories and topical area weighting. Google also have sophisticated algorithms for evaluating the trust and authority of each domain by closely looking at the data signals behind linking domains to ensure their trustworthiness. Google bonds whether these linking websites represent a quality source worth trusting with its algorithm rewards.

Strategies for Building Links on Google

Source

Developing comprehensive and engaging content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is built on the foundation of producing content that will naturally develop high-quality link signals for Google. Developing comprehensive and engaging content allows more potential opportunities for organic backlinks to a website or blog. Comprehensive, quality pieces provide deeper information and insights compared to other forms of superficial content.

A good goal when creating this sort of content is to include features such as audio, video, infographics or reviews in order to disproportionately influence link building so that you set yourself ahead of the competition. Such features add to the perceived quality of the content and appeal to more readers, as well as other webmasters who may link to such uniquely engaging pages.

Earning backlinks through outreach and relationship building

Earning backlinks, however, has remained much the same. Outreach and relationship building continues to be crucial component in acquiring quality links from reputable sources. Leveraging direct relationships by emphasizing mutual benefits is key when asking for a link.

Additionally, participating in trade shows, events and conferences can start conversations that might then increase one’s chances of getting recognized by an industry leader who is almost always on the lookout for partners capable of boosting audience engagement with fresh topics or materials they value.

Guest blogging on reputable websites

Guest blogging is a great way to build links on Google. These posts involve writing and publishing articles on relevant, high-authority websites related to your field or industry. These linkbacks increase chances of putting your target pages in improved rankings with this powerful off-page SEO activity. It also builds brand awareness and reaches leveraging established platforms.

When looking for the perfect website to submit your piece make sure it’s an authoritative one with positive engagement, natural visibility, reputable status built around similar topics and original content boasting engaged followers. Guest blogging for building high-quality links is a powerful strategy to do better in search engine rankings with organic, honest link-building activity.

Participating in industry-specific forums and communities

Industry-specific forums and communities are a great way to build links on Google, allowing for greater reach with like-minded peers in your industry. Creating genuine relationships by preferably being active contributors can lead to other members reaching out with potential opportunities for guest blogging or extended coverage.

Partaking in site interviews or sharing advice is another choice avenue to gain visibility as well. Whatever the forum resolution, always be sure that any contribution is informative whilst avoiding aggressive marketing tactics – such as link farming – which could incur penalties from Google.

Conclusion

Link building is an essential part of any comprehensive SEO strategy and entails adhering to multiple factors influenced by the individual values of both Bing and Google.

Developing a comprehensive approach that includes relevant content development (including guest blogging), outreach, social media promotion, leveraging local directories, relationship building, and investing in anchor text diversity when linking back, as well as taking advantage of the available webmaster tools serves many long-term benefits.

Regular monitoring and adjustments via thorough link analyses are needed to optimize link performance across both search engines.

By Nate Nead

Nate Nead is the CEO & Managing Member of Nead, LLC, a consulting company that provides strategic advisory services across multiple disciplines including finance, marketing and software development. For over a decade Nate had provided strategic guidance on M&A, capital procurement, technology and marketing solutions for some of the most well-known online brands. He and his team advise Fortune 500 and SMB clients alike. The team is based in Seattle, Washington; El Paso, Texas and West Palm Beach, Florida.

Sourced from readwrite

 

 

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Google vs Bing: Is one search engine really much better than the other?

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By Calvin Wankhede

Google wins the market share race, but Bing doesn’t compromise on features.

When it comes to searching the internet, your mind probably jumps to Google. But what about Microsoft’s search engine — Bing? It isn’t as popular or commonplace, but it’s certainly a viable alternative to Google and offers a handful of exclusive features to sweeten the pot. The latter includes a new ChatGPT-like chatbot that can assist you with complex search queries. But what else separates Google vs Bing and which search engine comes out on top? Here’s everything you need to know.

Google vs Bing usage: Which search engine has the most market share?

bing market share
Bing captured a third of US searches at one point.

Neither Google nor Microsoft discloses the exact number of searches or active users they serve each day, but third-parties paint a clear picture of who is in the lead. Broadly speaking, nine in every ten searches take place on Google.

According to Statista, Google enjoys an 84% market share in the desktop search engine race and the lead extends to 95% in the mobile market. Bing puts up an admirable fight with a nearly 9% market share in the PC space, but it doesn’t even break past the one percent market share mark on mobile. While these numbers may seem bleak, it’s worth keeping in mind that Bing gets over 12 billion searches every single month.

Bing serves one in every ten computer searches worldwide, but it’s more popular in some countries.

To summarize, Google’s worldwide market share ranges between 85 and 95%. Bing, meanwhile, is a clear underdog, despite the fact that it has been around since 2009. Still, it has managed to corner nearly 10% of the desktop search engine market all by itself. What’s more — many smaller search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo rely on Bing’s results as well, making it far more dominant than the numbers might suggest.

Moreover, Bing has the upper hand in certain regions like the United States where it claims to have served over 30% of total search results at one point. It’s also used by Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri digital assistants behind the scenes.

Despite the long road ahead, Microsoft remains committed to Bing and it’s not hard to see why. The company told analysts that it expects $2 billion in additional revenue each time Bing increases its market share by a single percentage point. And even with Bing’s currently minuscule presence, its ads division brings in roughly $18 billion in yearly revenue.

Google vs. Bing: Functionality and quality of results

It’s difficult to gauge the quality of results for the billions of possible search terms out there. Generally speaking, though, Google and Bing will both meet the needs of the average user. Both search engines allow you to search for text, videos, images, news, and even popular shopping websites.

In our use, we found that both search engines delivered reasonably accurate results. Both offer a list of links to relevant web pages as you’d expect from a search engine. In fact, the result pages don’t look that different from each other too. Bing and Google will sometimes pull snippets of text from trusted sources like Wikipedia. Finally, Bing will often also provide a visually rich infographic alongside the search results, as shown in the above screenshot.

Both Bing and Google deliver similar results, at least for simple search terms.

Moving on, Bing will often summarize text from multiple sources if you ask a yes or no question. Google will attempt to do the same thing, but its response only ever includes a single source. That doesn’t necessarily make Bing better, however, as we’ve seen both make mistakes even if they cite the correct sources.

bing vs google video search
(Left) Bing video search, (Right) Google video search

If you prefer using Google products like Maps, you might prefer using the search engine as well. Bing Maps, for example, doesn’t offer the same depth of traffic data and businesses as Google’s mapping service. On the other hand, Bing takes the win when it comes to searching for videos as it provides a visual interface and embeds the video player directly within the website. These are minor differences, but they have a noticeable impact on the usability of either search engine.

Does Bing or Google have the better AI chatbot?

google bard 2

In 2023, Microsoft announced Bing Chat — a conversational chatbot that makes searches seem more personalized and interactive. It’s based on the same technology as ChatGPT, which Microsoft has poured over ten billion dollars into so far.

AI chatbots like Bing Chat shine when you need answers to complex questions. Some examples include planning a holiday or picking out a gift for a close one. Here’s a sampling of Bing Chat in action on mobile:

The difference between ChatGPT and Bing Chat is that Microsoft allows its chatbot to search for live information on the internet. This makes it incredibly powerful in practice — you can use it to find matching pieces of furniture or compare various products from a certain standpoint. With traditional search, you’d need to perform multiple individual searches and do your own research.

Google does have a rival in the form of its Bard AI chatbot, but you cannot use it yet. Even though we saw the company demo this technology a couple of years ago, we’re still waiting for it to make its way to the broader public. Even when Google’s chatbot does arrive, it’s unclear how it will compete vs Bing Chat or ChatGPT. The latter’s underlying GPT-3 model benefitted from years of fine-tuning, both publicly and behind the scenes.

Can Bing manage to overtake Google?

microsoft bing in edge

It’s unlikely that Bing can steal Google’s thunder and become the top search engine globally. This is largely because Google pays billions of dollars to keep its position as the default search engine on many devices.

According to analysts’ estimates, Google pays Apple roughly $15 billion to maintain its default status on the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. We also know that the company mandates the installation of Google Mobile Services (GMS), Chrome, and other apps on virtually all Android phones. Microsoft, meanwhile, uses Bing as the default search engine on Windows and the Edge web browser. For the past decade and a half of Bing’s existence, Microsoft hasn’t tried to make it the default search engine for rival operating systems and web browsers. That means it’s unlikely to change now either.

Users can change their default search engine, of course, but most people simply do not venture into the settings menu. That’s a key reason why the Microsoft Rewards program exists — it incentivizes users to download the Bing app and use it on all possible platforms.

Having said that, Microsoft does have an ace up its sleeve in the form of Bing Chat. According to Microsoft, Bing Chat helped the search engine surpass 100 million daily active users for the first time ever. But by the company’s own admission, Bing remains a “small, low, single-digit share player” vs Google. Will that change in the future? Only time will tell.

By Calvin Wankhede

Sourced from Android Authority

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Bing vs. Google: Which Search Engine Indexes More Content?

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By Tomek Rudzki

Search engines cannot discover and index every page on the web – they need to make choices in that regard. And, though all search engines serve the same purpose, they use different criteria for which pages to index.  

That being said, it’s generally good if a search engine can crawl and index as much valuable content as possible – it increases the odds that it will show users what they’re looking for.

I was curious about which search engine – Bing or Google – indexes more content in general. 

This article describes the different aspects of my research, and though I’d need more data to draw definite conclusions, I still managed to gather many unique and valuable insights.

Here is what I discovered about how Bing and Google index web pages.

Analysing indexing data: methodology and results

Index coverage of a random sample of WordPress sites

The first step of my research was to collect a sample of pages to check their indexing statistics.

I decided that a good starting point would be to use a sample of websites using the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. There was a practical reason behind choosing this plugin: it divides sitemaps by sections, which would let me analyse which sections are indexed the most.

I found a list of websites that use the Yoast SEO plugin on builtwith.com, a site reporting on websites using given technologies or tools. I chose a random sample of 200 websites from a list of sites using Yoast SEO.

Then, I checked the indexing statistics of those websites using ZipTie.dev, and the data that came out is very interesting.

Bing indexed more web pages than Google. 

Take a look at the charts below that show the indexing statistics for given sitemap categories:

chart comparing indexation of various sitemap categories in Bing and Google
chart comparing indexation of various sitemap categories in Bing and Google

The index coverage is the same for Bing and Google for the story and press categories. Moreover, Google did index more content in guides and locations. However, in all the remaining sitemap categories, Bing’s indexing exceeds Google’s – including important categories, like posts, products, and images.

But does this mean Bing is also able to crawl more pages than Google? Or do they crawl similar amounts of content but have different preferences when it comes to indexing?

Crawling data for a sample of our clients

To extend my findings, I checked the data for a few of our clients in both Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.

These tools show the pages that the respective search engine knows about for a given domain.

In Google Search Console, I looked at the All known pages appearing in the Index Coverage report and checked the number of URLs for all four statuses (Errors, Valid, Valid with Warnings, and Excluded).

In Bing Webmaster Tools, in the Site Explorer section, which contains indexing data for the pages on a given domain, I filtered the view to display All URLs.

This showed me all the discovered URLs for each domain I analysed.

After comparing the data I got in both of these tools, I noticed that Google discovered more pages than Bing. 

On the other hand (assuming these findings are consistent across both tested website samples), we already know that the pages discovered by Google and Bing are more likely to get indexed by Bing. 

Keep in mind that these results are only for a small sample of sites and may not represent the whole web.

Index coverage of a sample of popular sites

The third aspect of my research was to check the indexing status of a few popular websites using ZipTie to see how it varies between Bing and Google.

I learned that Bing is much more eager to index these sites than Google. This confirmed my earlier findings for the sample of WordPress websites using YoastSEO.

Take a look at the data I got:

chart showing percentages of pages indexed by Bing and Google

Bing vs. Google indexing – initial observations

Can we tell that Bing is a better search engine based on the data?

Although Bing indexes more content, we cannot point out a single winner just by looking at the indexing statistics. We don’t know why Bing is indexing more than Google.

My hypothesis is that Google might be “pickier” than Bing. It’s no mystery that index selection is a thing.

We’ve been saying it for years – getting indexed by Google is becoming increasingly more difficult.

We also know that search engines crawl pages at different rates. 

Here is what John Mueller said about how often Googlebot crawls pages:

I think the hard part here is that we don’t crawl URLs with the same frequency all the time. So some URLs we will crawl daily. Some URLs maybe weekly. Other URLs every couple of months, maybe even every once half year or so. So this is something that we try to find the right balance for, so that we don’t overload your server. […] So, in particular, if you do things like site queries, then there’s a chance that you’ll see those URLs that get crawled like once every half year. They’ll still be there after a couple of months. […] if you think that these URLs should really not be indexed at all, then maybe you can kind of back that up and say, well, here’s a sitemap file with the last modification date so that Google goes off and tries to double-check these a little bit faster than otherwise.
source: John Mueller

I also found some interesting ideas in Bing’s documentation:

To measure how smart our crawler is, we measure bingbot crawl efficiency. The crawl efficiency is how often we crawl and discover new and fresh content per page crawled.  Our crawl efficiency north star is to crawl an URL only when the content has been added (URL not crawled before), updated (fresh on-page context or useful outbound links). The more we crawl duplicated, unchanged content, the lower our Crawl Efficiency metric is.
source: Bingbot Series: Maximizing Crawl Efficiency”

Bing may not want to go deep when crawling websites as doing so could provide little value and cause their KPIs to drop.

We know that Bing has been working on making crawling more efficient. For instance, Bing attempted to optimize the crawling of static content and identify patterns that would reduce the crawling frequency across many websites.

Also, consider the differences in how Google and Bing indexed the random WordPress websites – they were much smaller. In the case of very popular websites, they are much more significant.

This leads me to think that, in line with the fact that Bing openly admits they use user behaviour data in their algorithms, Bing heavily prioritizes indexing websites that are popular, while for Google, popularity is less of a factor.

Introducing IndexNow

Recently, Bing took it a step further by adopting the IndexNow protocol. You can use IndexNow to inform Bing and Yandex about new or updated content.

Through our tests, we found out that Bing will typically start crawling a page between 5 seconds and 5 minutes from when it’s submitted using IndexNow.

 

IndexNow is an initiative for a more efficient Internet: By telling search engines whether an URL has been changed, website owners provide a clear signal helping search engines to prioritize crawl for these URLs, thereby limiting the need for exploratory crawl to test if the content has changed […].We will continue to learn and improve at [a] larger scale and adjust crawl rates for sites implementing IndexNow. Our goal is to give each adopter the maximum benefit in terms of indexation, crawl load management and freshness of the content to searchers.

source: Bing Blog, “IndexNow – Instantly Index your web content in Search Engines”

IndexNow allows websites to get their content indexed faster and use fewer resources for crawling. As a result, businesses can create a better experience for their customers by giving them access to the most relevant information.

We created a tool that will help you submit URLs or sitemaps to IndexNow even faster and easier.

functionality of IndexNow for submitting new pages to search engines

Crucially, IndexNow is an opportunity for smaller search engines like Bing and Yandex to add to their indexes from an extensive database of content. IndexNow addresses the issue that search engines, including Google, struggle with today – having to crawl and render growing amounts of content.

Time will tell if Google adopts the IndexNow protocol or creates an alternative solution that will allow site owners to submit pages for indexing.

Optimizing how pages are crawled and indexed

Another takeaway from my indexing analysis is how important it is to simplify crawling and indexing for search engines.

First, you need to create and maintain sitemaps that include your valuable URLs. Sitemaps are helpful for Bing and Google for discovering the content they should index. 

Search engines will struggle to pick up which pages are relevant and should be indexed if you fail to submit an optimized sitemap. For more details on setting up a sitemap and what pages to include, read our Ultimate Guide to XML Sitemaps.

Additionally, you need to have a robots.txt file containing correct directives for bots and properly implemented ‘noindex’ tags on pages that shouldn’t be indexed.

Wrapping up 

To define a clear pattern in Bing’s and Google’s indexing, I would have to inspect many more websites, but there are certain ideas we can get from my samples of data:

  • Bing indexes more content than Google.
  • Google discovers more content than Bing, suggesting that Google is pickier with indexing. The guiding principle for Bing is to crawl less and focus on the content that has been added or updated.
  • Bing prioritizes indexing of popular websites, while popularity is less of a factor for Google.

We can also see that content quality and optimizing your site’s crawling and indexing are vital aspects of SEO, and they can’t be underestimated or neglected. Moreover, these factors will likely continue to be crucial as the web grows and search engine algorithms become more sophisticated.

By Tomek Rudzki

Sourced from ONELY

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All of the anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic ad-targeting options offered by Big Tech

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By Mike Murphy.

Over the last few days, a slew of reporting, inspired by ProPublica, has revealed that it’s actually quite easy, through the programmatic structure of most online advertising, to create ads meant to target those who have espoused racist, antisemitic, or other hateful ideas.

Here’s a quick rundown of the major internet companies, and what has been discovered about their advertising platforms:

Facebook

On Sept. 14, ProPublica reported that Facebook allowed advertisers to target categories and ideas such as “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world,’” based on interest Facebook users had expressed on the social network and terms with which they had used to describe themselves.

While Facebook removed those categories after ProPublica’s investigation, Slate then discovered that there are dozens of other racist, sexist, and xenophobic categories which advertisers could potentially target. It took Facebook less than a minute to approve ads against phrases like “Kill Muslimic Radicals”and “Ku-Klux-Klan,” and Slate found myriad other options, like “Killing Bitches,” “Killing Hajis,” and “Nazi Party (Canada).”

Facebook released a statement yesterday after ProPublica’s report, saying in part:

Keeping our community safe is critical to our mission. And to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue. We want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook.

Google

BuzzFeed discovered similar targeting issues on Google’s AdWords platform, which runs the advertisements you see on Google search results pages. Typing in keyword suggestions (which advertisers use to build their ads and figure out who to target) like “why do jews ruin everything” led to the system generating more keyword suggestions like “jews ruin the world” and “jewish parasites.” Buzzfeed was also able to build and launch a campaign around the phrase “black people ruin neighborhoods.”

When Quartz attempted to recreate BuzzFeed’s efforts using similar terms, or terms like those used by ProPublica and Slate, no keyword suggestions were returned. Google has since disabled many of the keywords that BuzzFeed tested.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president in charge of ads, told Quartz in a statement:

Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.

Twitter

The Daily Beast was able to target similarly derogatory demographics on Twitter. It reported:

Twitter’s advertising platform tells prospective marketers it has 26.3 million users interested in the derogatory term “wetback,” 18.6 million accounts that are likely to engage with the word “Nazi,” and 14.5 million users who might be drawn to “n**ger.”

A Twitter representative told Quartz about the Daily Beast’s report:

The terms cited in this story have been blacklisted for several years and we are looking into why the campaign cited in this story were able to run for a very short period of time. Twitter actively prohibits and prevents any offensive ads from appearing on our platform, and we are committed to understanding 1) why this happened, and 2) how to keep it from happening again.

Snapchat

Quartz checked on Snapchat’s advertising platform to see if we were able to target using similar terms used on the other platforms. We were not able to: It seems that Snapchat’s demography isn’t quite as granular as the other platforms, which are far more text-based than Snapchat, and so it’s likely easier for them to glean what sorts of things its users are sharing than through all the videos and images posted to Snapchat.

Bing

Microsoft’s second-placed search network seems to have a similar problem to its other platforms. When Quartz created a test advertising campaign on Bing Ads, we weren’t able to directly target specifically loaded terms, but searching for just about any phrase in Bing’s “keyword suggestions” generator will generate specific keywords that you might want to try to target instead. Here’s one example, using “Hitler” as the search term:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 5.51.52 PM
(Screenshot/Bing Ads)

A representative for Bing told Quartz:

We take steps to ensure our Bing Ads always meet reasonable standards. We are committed to working with partners who share our vision for relevant, impactful brand interaction and respect the integrity of consumer choice.

Yahoo

Quartz attempted to create an ad campaign on Yahoo, but it seems there’s no simple way to create one online without speaking to a representative from Oath (Yahoo’s parent company) first. And presumably fewer people would feel comfortable telling a sales rep the sorts of things they’re targeting than they would inputting them into a computer system. Hopefully.

LinkedIn

Microsoft’s professional social network doesn’t seem to let users target based on arbitrary phrases or demographics. Other than geography, these are the only things you can target against on LinkedIn:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 6.01.21 PM
(Screenshot/LinkedIn)

The only section that might have the potential for hateful terms would be in “Member groups”—but a cursory search of terms like those used above didn’t reveal many professional hate groups to target on the platform. We did, however, come across this group:

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 6.03.39 PM
(Screenshot/LinkedIn)

Upon further inspection, however, it seems that this group was set up by a LinkedIn employee trying to see whether they could set up a group with a title like this. Obviously, it worked:

(Screenshot/LinkedIn)

LinkedIn sent Quartz the following statement:

Hate has no place on LinkedIn and will not be tolerated. When we are made aware of such content, we act swiftly to enforce our policy and remove said content. On Friday, a member of our team created a group solely for internal testing purposes and after a brief testing period, we took the group down.

By Mike Murphy.

Sourced from QUARTZ

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Bing now shows fact checks in search results

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By Jacob Kastrenakes

Following Google’s lead earlier this year, Bing has added fact checking tags to search results.

A fact check label might now appear below results from Snopes, PolitFact, and other fact checking organizations, making it much easier to see their ruling on any given claim. Rather than having to click into the link, the site’s verdict — true, false, or somewhere in between — will now be pulled out into the search preview.

The feature should help to call out incorrect stories, but only to an extent. If an illegitimate news story makes it into your Bing search results (or Google, for that matter), it’ll still appear unadorned. The hope, however, is that a fact checking article might appear alongside it, and with the article’s verdict pulled out and bolded, readers might see and take heed before clicking through.

Like on Google, the fact checking labels aren’t limited to just the major fact checking sites — there’s some common code that websites can embed to let search engines pull out their information. That leaves the tag open for abuse by, of course, the same people making these false stories in the first place. But Bing says it isn’t guaranteeing that all websites that include a fact check tag will have their fact checks displayed; instead, it’ll try to confirm that sites “follow commonly accepted criteria for fact checks” before showing them.

The spread of fact checking labels follows the tumultuous US election, which saw false articles and Russian propaganda reach voters to a shocking new extent. This happened most infamously over social media, like Facebook, and Facebook has since begun adding its own fact checking tools. Google, meanwhile, began rolling out fact checking tags to its news sections late last year, before bringing them to search in April.

By Jacob Kastrenakes

Sourced from THE VERGE

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