Bing Confirms They Use User Engagement Metrics for Ranking Websites in Search

Barry Schwartz recently interviewed Microsoft’s Christi Olson and Fabrice Canal about What SEOs need to know about Bing Webmaster Guidelines, where he asked them about their use of user engagement metrics; including click-throughs, pogosticking, clicking on different results, changing the query and more on rankings.

Fabrice Canal, principal program manager at Bing, Microsoft, said “We do what is the best for the customer. If we found that this is very useful data and we believe it is useful data for the ranker, why not use this data. What’s preventing this. People are searching, providing insights on what they are looking for. We do believe that this is useful data that is helping us to help them to retrieving the best content, satisfying customer or driving the best content on the internet.”

Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft, added “and the way to look at it Barry, like when Fabrice and I and Frederick and I talk about this, you can have an amazing page that ranks really well, but if users spend a second or two on the page and they click back, there’s something wrong with it. Is it a load issue? Is there a 500 issue? Is something happening? Because if it doesn’t matter the content’s amazing, if users aren’t staying on that site, maybe they’ve put a pop-up in. There’s something going on there, that is a signal that regardless of what content is on the page, the users are saying it does not add value.”

Google is known to have been using similar user engagement metrics, but it’s not something they often say in public.