Bings spam filter has impacted about 3% of Bing queries. The principal development manager of Bing Index Quality; Igor Rondel targeted spammers stuffing their URLs with too many keywords with the intention of increasing their index ranking in Bing. The idea of keyword stuffing is to match a user’s search with a sites exact URL. This is called exact match domain and it is a factor when deciding a websites ranking. Incorporating keywords into a URL is important but there becomes a point when it is overbearing and is considered spamming.
The impact on users has totaled 3% of Bing queries which is about 1 in 10 URLs. 5 Million sites, composing of 130 million URLS have been impacted with 75% traffic reduction to these sites from Bing.
Ignor Rondel specifically included examples of sites that were impacted:
- www.cheapviagrausa.com
- www.cheapviagrapharma.com
- www.buyviagracheapviagraergr.com
- www.gmailloginsignup.com
Its important to recognize that not all URLs with multiple keywords got penalized. A majority of websites with multiple keywords are actually not considered URL keyword stuffing.
Bing looks at a number of different measurables to help indicate if a website is indeed stuffing there URL with too many keywords, such as:
- Site size
- Number of hosts
- Number of words in host / domain names and path
- Host / domain / path keyword co-occurrence
- % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host / domain name keywords