In a brave move, Igor Rondel from the Bing Index Quality team has a new blog post where they admit they need to do a better job at communicating with webmasters.  Now, they aim to make this change with more frequent announcements from their team about changing and insights, in addition to what webmasters hear from Duane Forrester (who is officially the Product Manager for Bing Webmaster).

How does Bing plan to raise their visibility to webmasters?  They plan to let webmasters know more regularly about updates, on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.  They plan to monitor and respond to webmasters who have questions or comments for search quality.  They also plan to “cover topics ranging from blogging about the latest and important updates in this space to spotlighting some of the cool innovation we’re working on as well as providing a heads up about potential traffic impacting changes being rolled out.”

They also make specific mention that they will be providing a heads up for things such as major algorithm changes that have a larger impact.  While for many SEOs this might not be crucuial, but for those webmasters who do get a majority of traffic from Bing, it will be extremely helpful, especially if they try and troubleshoot decline changes and are not exactly sure what prompted the decline.

They also say Duane Forrester’s role as Product Manager for the Bing Webmaster team means he has his time split, so he isn’t always as accessible for specific webmaster concerns, simply because he is also speaking on general SEO, content quality and other topics related to Bing Webmaster tools team.

Duane is one of Bing’s most prolific external communicator. Although he’s formally the Product Manager for Bing Webmaster, he does indeed often utilize his diverse Bing knowledge to speak to other topics including SEO, content quality, etc… And while Index Quality team has been ‘shy’ in blogging about our work in the past, Duane often helped fill the void posting his insights on related topics and speaking to them at conferences. Moving forward we hope to maintain a frequent rhythm of external communication to support a broader communication strategy that expands on what Duane has done for us in the past.

It is a smart move to do this so close to the start of the leave of absence by Matt Cutts, which started earlier this month.  He is the most visible person from Google’s Search Quality team, although he has left it in equally capable hands of the rest of the Search Quality team in his absence.  But Bing can definitely benefit from raising their own visibility at a time where Google’s will seem to decline.

It also raises the question if we will be seeing someone ala Duane Forrester becoming much more visible from the Index Quality side of things, having a second personality for webmasters wouldn’t be a bad idea.