Bing SEO
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Microsoft To Replace MSNBot With BingBot October 1, 2010
The Bing Search Blog announced that on October 1st, MSNBot will be renamed to BingBot. Bing has been testing a beta bot since November of last year. On October 1st, the beta label will be removed from the Bot name and it will be named BingBot. You should see the following useragent in your log […]
SMX Advanced Session: SEO For Bing Vs. Google
SMX Advanced kicked off this morning in sunny Seattle (yes, seriously) with a packed house for the opening session of the SEO/Social Media track, “SEO for Google vs. Bing: How Different are They?” I won’t be recapping all of the sessions I attend today and tomorrow, but will do my best to share any interesting […]
Bing & Yahoo Soon To Support Canonical Tag
More than a year since the three major search engines united to announce the canonical tag, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon. Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical […]
Bing Updates Webmaster FAQs
Bing has updated their Webmaster FAQs document. The new PDF download it 28 pages long, 82 questions and answers deep and broken out in 12 categories. The questions and answers are all hyperlinked within the FAQs PDF document. PDF does add a level of readability but why not publish them as a web document as […]
7 Ways To Conquer Natural Search When Google & Bing Face Off In 2010
When it comes to search marketing, the Big Three is about to become the Big Two. The deal heard round the world this past July comes to fruition in 2010—and the much-anticipated partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo! will have significant implications for search engine optimization. Paid search will no doubt face its share of opportunities […]
Bing Admits MSNbot Is Slow
Via Search Engine Roundtable comes news of refreshing candor from a Bing employee about the performance of Bing’s crawler, which is still referred to as MSNbot. The admission happened yesterday in the Bing Webmaster Center forums, when Brett Yount, a program manager for Bing, replied to a question about why Bing has only indexed one […]
Bing Still Working On Canonical Tag Support, Suggests Other Ways To Manage Duplicate Content
While Google has recently announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains, Bing says it’s still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content. The rel=”canonical” link element was introduced earlier this year as a way for webmasters to […]
Does Bing Have What It Takes To Flaunt Video Search Results?
Now that Bing is officially a major player, it’s time to ask some important questions. Are Bing video search results delivering a winning performance? Does Bing match searcher queries with relevant results? For advertisers, what is needed from an optimization standpoint to make your video standout among a search crowd?
Video Interview With Bing’s Webmaster Team
Rand from SEOmoz posted a 17 minute interview with the Bing webmaster team from Microsoft. In the interview he talks with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing about topics including market share, the Yahoo deal, SEO for Bing, Bing webmaster tools, and the Bing IIS Toolkit. Here is the video: SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Interview: […]
Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand?
For over two years now, Microsoft’s search engine has been generating fake information that can make site owners think they’re getting strange search traffic (including porn traffic), when they are not. It’s time for this to come to an end. The culprit? Microsoft’s “crawler,” the software that visits web pages across the web that go […]
Bing To Ramp Up MSNBot 2’s Workload
Microsoft announced that MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta, may be ramped up a lot more and webmasters might begin to notice the new bot in their log files. The new bot has been out there since December 2008, and the useragent is just about the same as the original bot. New Bot: msnbot/2.0b […]
How Live Search Penalties Work
The Live Search blog posted a comprehensive guide on how to determine if your site is penalized in Live Search and if so, what actions you can take to remedy the issue. I’ll highlight some of the key points in this excellent blog post. Microsoft said, “most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened.” […]
Live Search Discusses Good & Bad Links
Jeremiah Andrick from the Microsoft Live Search team has written a detailed blog post named Getting the right kind of links. In this blog post, Jeremiah explains the issues Microsoft sees with link exchanges and then gives tips on how to get “the right kind of links.” Those tips include to be the “subject matter […]
What Is Search Engine Spam? The Video Edition
Search engines tell marketers not to spam them. Many search marketers also advise newcomers not to spam. Spamming issues get debated online. But what is search engine spam? What’s it look like? How’s it smell? And why do search engines (not to mention users) hate it? At our recent SMX East search marketing conference, representatives […]
Google & Microsoft Share Advice For Webmasters, SEOs
The ever-helpful teams writing for Google’s Webmaster Central blog and Microsoft Live Search’s Webmaster Center blog have published a variety of videos and presentations this week in the name of helping webmasters and search engine optimizers.
Live Search Is Updating, Expect Ranking Changes
Live Search September 2008 Update Underway from the Search Engine Roundtable reports discussion at WebmasterWorld that Live Search is undergoing a major index and ranking update. The Live Search results seem to have changed, and webmasters and SEOs are taking notice. I personally noticed referral increases and drops from Live Search on some of the […]
iProspect: Blended Search Resulting In More Clicks On News, Images, And Video
Since the advent of “blended” or “universal search” last year across the major engines, there’s been ongoing discussion and speculation about its impact on user behavior and search marketing. Gord Hotchkiss last year wrote extensively about how blended search (on Google) has in fact shifted the user focus from the so-called “golden triangle” at the […]
MSNbot 1.1: Live Search Implements A More Efficient Crawl
Today, Microsoft announced changes to their Live Search crawler intended to reduce bandwidth resources during the crawl of a site. MSNbot (upgraded to version 1.1) now supports both HTTP compression and conditional get. The post on the Live Search Webmaster Center blog describes each feature in detail and includes links to tools you can use […]
The 2007 Paid Links War, In Review
The paid links debate is back, this time about whether Google wants all links in a paid post to have a nofollow attribute. Below, a look at the latest round, plus a recap of this year’s "War On Paid Links" by Google and where the other search engines stand on the subject.
Webmaster Support Forum For Christmas (& All Year Round) From The Search Engines
Last year on Christmas Day, Barry reported over at Search Engine Roundtable how Adam Lasnik and I spent a bit of time answering questions on the Google Webmaster Central forums. This year, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller keeps up the tradition. In the spirit of the season, I thought it might be fun to […]
Microsoft Live Search Fixes Issue With Listing Google AdWords Ads
Earlier today, we reported that over 4 million Google AdSense ads were being indexed by Microsoft Live Search. Tonight, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center blog has posted that they’ve identified and fixed the issue and that search results should return to normal within the next few days.
Microsoft Reports That Issues With Their Live Search Cloaking Detection System Have Been Fixed
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 […]
Live Search Webmaster Center Blog Now Open For Business
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
Microsoft Launches Live Search Webmaster Tools Beta While Developing Version Two
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 […]
Live Search’s Link Command Now Working
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 […]
Microsoft’s Adult & Pharma Referrals Are Search Quality Tests
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 […]
Live Search Webmaster Portal: SEO Tools Coming From Microsoft
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 […]
Live Search Now Supporting Sitemaps Autodiscovery Via Robots.txt File
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.
Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery
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 […]
Live Search To Offer Webmaster Tools Section Soon?
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 […]
Microsoft On Poprank And Indexing Objects For Vertical & Web Search
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…
Live.com Link Command Currently Offline
The Microsoft Live.com link command operator is currently offline and has been offline since yesterday morning. Kevin Gibbons reported yesterday that a link:https://www.msn.com returns a blank page. I
Yahoo Provides NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions
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 […]
Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates
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 […]