Today, Microsoft has posted to the Live Search Webmaster Center blog that the cloaking detection system they have been running for the past few months has, for some sites, skewed site statistics and ads reporting, as well as caused a high traffic load, and they have made some adjustments to the process to correct these errors. Below, details on the problems this process caused, what Live Search is doing about them, and a brief look at how the engines have historically dealt with cloaking. For the last few months, there have been slight rumblings in the places webmasters frequent about odd re [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages

Microsoft announced the launch of the new Live Search Webmaster Center Blog. The Live Search Webmaster Team promises to use the blog to communicate: New tools and features available to webmasters Search engine optimization tips A method of open communication with SEOs and Webmasters You can subscribe to the RSS feed via this link. I am not sure if comments are disabled or not. It seems like some posts have some comments, but I am personally not able to comment at the moment. The other search engines also have blogs to communicate with webmasters. Google has the Google Webmaster Centra [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Microsoft: Marketing

The long expected webmaster support area from Microsoft has arrived. Microsoft Live Search has launched Live Search Webmaster Center and a new "Webmaster Tools" beta as part of the support services. I had posted detailed screen captures of the tools several days before the public beta was announced. Now that people have access to this tools, they are asking questions. What do the green "rank" bars represent exactly? Why are the features so limiting? Are they coming out with more features soon? Rand at SEOmoz interviewed Eytan Seidman of the Live Search team. In his interview, Rand said [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO

Karen Blakeman reported that you can now search use link command searches at Live Search again. Microsoft first pulled back the link command in March of this year, due to trouble with automated queries. But as Karen reported, it seems to be back with a new prefix. Just add a plus sign before the operators and it works. For example, a linkdomain command is now +linkdomain:www.searchengineland.com, and a standard link command is now +link:www.searchengineland.com. Want to comment or have questions? Join the discussion at Sphinn. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building: General | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO

I have been tracking a WebmasterWorld thread that has reports of weird Microsoft Live Search referral strings that come from Microsoft-owned IP blocks but show irrelevant keywords in the adult and pharmaceutical space. Today I reported that these findings are indeed valid and are official Microsoft tests. A Microsoft representative explained that these referral strings are a "quality check we run on selected pages." What are people seeing in their logs exactly? Here is an example line from a log file posted at WebmasterWorld: 65.55.165.11 - - [28/Aug/2007:22:56:14 +0200] "GET /aut.php?id [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Spamming

If there's anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it's the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It's practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I'll explain more about why you shouldn't worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it. The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn't visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Channel: SEO | Features: General | Google: SEO | How To: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Flash | SEO: General | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Yahoo: SEO

Later this year, Microsoft has announced that there will be a public beta of "Live Search Webmaster Portal," a collection of tools and information for site owners akin to the Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer offerings from those respective search engines. A private beta of these tools is about to begin. The new portal will consolidate existing submit links such as: Web search submission Local listing control Live Product Search Upload Video submission Book submission It will also consolidate existing tools such as the Live Search Box and introduce new tools with [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO

This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft Live Search is finally now supporting sitemaps via autodiscovery. Microsoft will only use your sitemaps file if it is listed in your robots.txt file. You cannot currently ping Microsoft or upload your sitemaps file to Microsoft. Microsoft, along with Ask.com, Google and Yahoo, united to support autodiscovery of sitemaps in April. Google, Yahoo and Ask.com quickly supported it on that day or soon after. Microsoft finally began supporting the reading of these sitemaps files as of yesterday. How do you specify the locati [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft. Information on how to create sitemaps files can be found at the Sitemaps.org site. Aside from the sitemaps XML formal, you can al [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Eytan Seidman of Live Search responded to the recent questions on why the Live.com link command went offline. He said it was primarily due to "mass automated usage for data mining." So they have decided to block all queries with backlink operators for the time being. Eytan adds that they hope to bring this functionality back "in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries." To me, this is a sign that Microsoft is working on a webmaster tools section, similar to what Google has with Webmaster Central and what Yahoo has with Site Explorer. As we know, Google has [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO

A new paper from Microsoft Research, Web Object Retrieval (pdf), discusses an approach towards Web indexing that changes focus from page level, to that of indexing objects found upon pages. OK, so that does that mean? It's easiest to show you first, rather than tell you... Microsoft Product Search Take a look at Microsoft's Products Search (http://products.live.com/). Brian Smith went into a lot of detail on the Microsoft's product search last May in eCommerce, Microsoft Style. Microsoft's Live Product Search allows people to upload product information into their database, but it also cr [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Microsoft: Live Search Academic

The Microsoft Live.com link command operator is currently offline and has been offline since yesterday morning. Kevin Gibbons reported yesterday that a link:http://www.msn.com returns a blank page. I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO

Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag -- one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted "Using the robots meta tag," providing some clarity from Google. In addition, both Yahoo and Microsoft have also sent me information on using the tag. I'll run through what everyone says below, complete with charts for easy at-a-glance comparisons. The meta robots tag was an open standard created over a decade ago and designed initiall [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Channel: SEO | Features: General | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | How To: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | Yahoo: SEO

Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It also cover how Yahoo's currently doing a reindexing change that might impact rankings. More on that below, plus tips about also blocking the Open Directory information from being used for your pages and some possible conflicts with multiple robots tags. Sometimes pages are listed in both Yahoo's crawler-based search results and within its human-compil [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | Yahoo: SEO

A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years. But that's not all! Read now and you'll even [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Ask: Web Search | Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Search Features: Dates | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: General | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | Stats: Freshness | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer