Nagu Rangan with Jason Barnard at SMX London 2019 Nagu Rangan talks with Jason Barnard about how Bing ranking works. First question. Very obvious “What are the ranking factors”. He tells me that ranking factors are just a means to an end. Then Nagu tells me that relevancy is Bing’s North Star. There is no point in distinguishing between ranking factors and ranking signals. I ask what the ranking factors are (again) and Nagu politely that he gets leery when answering on the details. Tells me that obsessing on individual ranking factors is a futile excercise since the factors and their weightings are constantly changing. He guides me to the three considerations that a search engine to optimise user satisfaction. Relevancy, Quality and Context. We move onto what is the optimal keyword density. understanding without Deep Learning and Neural Networks (that Bing has been using since 2006). I manage to bully Nagu into agreeing that that everything we do as SEOs should serve Understanding, Deliverability and Credibility. I tell Nagu my theory about how the topic layer might work and he tells me my theory is a great product idea. So I suppose that means my theory is wrong and isn’t going to happen anytime soon :( Then a chat about the weather which sounds boring but isn’t. Does Bing have the same bidding system as Google for rich elements. No clear answer there but Nagu hints that it is a similar system. Bing is getting jiggy with real time information so freshness and recency is really important to Bing and is a driver of rich elements too. Theresa May gets a mention – because when she was 5, “Bing wasn’t a Thing”.