Microsoft MSN Search Archives

I reported this last week at Search Engine Land, that Microsoft furthered their search deal with Facebook. In short, Bing will now power global Facebook searches and include fuller search results.

Now that the search industry had some time to digest the news and here are some quotes from the WebmasterWorld thread:

Each page view with a search "powered by Bing" will be a tiny advertisement for Bing. Google will be hit hard by this. Finally, Google gets what it deserves, after having ignored important needs (like transparency and privacy) from publishers and webusers for so long. What joy!

I would have serious issues with FB if I knew Google had access to the FB data coupled with their famous virtually non-expiring, unique tracking cookie.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Canonical URLs and domains to most SEOs are a common issue they run across. How each search engine handles the various patterns of URLs that seem or are duplicate to each other, may differ.

In a Bing Community thread, there is a comment from Brett Yount, a Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, on how Bing typically handles WWW vs non-WWW issues. By that I mean, if you both the http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/ URLs return the same page, without redirection. Brett said:

It really doesn't matter if the site your link is residing on is www or non-www. More important is the structure of the URL they are using to link to you--especially if your site is not canonicalized using 301 redirects. When not redirected, we treat the non-www and the www version of your site as two different sites, so if you have links out there with and without the www, your whole site rank is affected. Canonicalizing your site to one or the other will automatically cause us to combine all the links and apply them to the chosen version of your site and may help increase your site rank.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

A funny WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO scratching his head in wonderment as to how he ranks so well in Bing, without really having any SEO reason to be. Let me quote what he said:

Right now my two-month-old site, with NO backlinks established but good internal content and linking (not SEO'd, just logically laid out), is #1 in Bing for a term that surprised the heck out of me... related, yes, but seriously American Express or Mastercard or any number of established entities should be #1 on these terms. They are #2 and #3.

At first I thought it was maybe some kind of local thing... that those companies are nowhere near me, but my site IS near me and therefore it's showing local relevant results first? But nope, if I remote into a server in a datacenter on the other side of the country and run a search from there it's #1 there too. Crazy...

In Google, the site is half way down page 3 for the same term, about where I expected it would be given its age and competition.

I'm certainly not going to call up Bing and complain about it, but it's freakin weird.

I was hoping, like for me, the thread would make you smile after a long week.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As you know, I track the search marketing forums, including many of the official search engine forums, to find the latest breaking news and issues that are important to the community. I pay particular close attention to what the official search engine representatives say in these forums.

It appears that Brett Yount, the community lead at the Bing Forums and Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center, has gone missing in action. His last post was 20 days ago, on January 7th in a Bing Community thread.

I know he may have recently said things he probably shouldn't have. Did that lead to him being fired or replaced? I don't know. I certainly hope not. Brett was a ray of sun for people like me, who like to see search reps who are honest, forthcoming and simply good people.

Brett - we miss you - please come back. There are tons of webmasters who need your help and guidance in the Bing forum.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Update: Bing Tweeted:

Brett’s taking some personal time off. Unrelated to forums, for the record ^az

The Bing Search Blog announced that they have now made their search suggestions more current. Now, Bing will update the search suggestions every 15 minutes or so, to take into account breaking news and current trends.

For example, the Australian Open is going on right now and here is me typing [aus] into Bing:

Google already does this with their search suggestions, so it is nice to see Bing go this route as well. Now, Bing will have to deal with questions about censorship of trending topics.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft's Bing blog announced they will reduce the time frame they store search data, from 18 months to only 6 months. This is in response to the European Union's request that search companies reduce the time they store such data. Microsoft Bing is the first major search engine to comply with those demands.

Bing said:

Specifically, we are reducing the amount of time we store IP addresses from searchers to 6 months. Currently we keep that information for 18 months before we delete it. Generally, when Bing receives search data we do a few things: first, we take steps to separate your account information (such as email or phone number) from other information (what the query was, for example). Then, after 18 months we take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query. Under the new policy, we will continue to take all the steps we applied previously – but now we will remove the IP address completely at 6 months, instead of 18 months. We think this gives us the right balance between making search better for consumers (we use the data to improve the service we offer) and providing greater protection for the privacy of our users.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has additional history and insight into this change.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about a search on Bing for [digital camera]. If you search on Bing for that query, you will not only see search results that match [digital camera] but Bing will show you other related queries and their search results.

Bing will show you 3 additional results for each of the following related queries, they include: Digital Camera Brands, Digital Camera Types, Top 10 Digital Cameras, Digital Camera Repair and Digital Camera Accessories. Here is a video showing this:

The interesting part here is that this is somewhat like the Google knows best but not fully. Here Bing is showing you what you queried for first and then shows you other search results that they think would be useful.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

When you ask someone what time is it, you normally don't have to second guess them. But when it comes to asking Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask.com what time is it, you have to second guess them.

If you search [bangladesh time] at the four search engines, you will have Google and Yahoo telling you one time, while Bing.com and Ask.com telling you a different time. Who do you believe?

Google & Yahoo:

Bing & Ask.com:

So who is right?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

One of the latest comments to come from Microsoft's Bing representative in the Bing Forums was that they consider themselves to be "fairly slow." Fairly slow at indexing new sites and new pages, that is.

Brett Yount, the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, said in a Bing Forums thread:

It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow.

Did he just say that? For real?

So what is Microsoft's solution to get new sites into their index? Well, either spam Digg or Yahoo Buzz to be discovered or post a message in the Site not in index thread at Bing Forums and they will manually add you. Yes, there is a forum thread pretty much acting as a URL submit form. How 1995 of them.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Bing doesn't support the canonical tag at all. I kind of blasted Brett Yount, the Product Manager of Bing Webmaster Center, that he kept on saying Bing uses it as a "hint."

Today he comes back into the forum and answers a question related to it in a Bing Forum thread. Brett said, "to my knowledge, we have very little support for the canonical tag."

Brett, is it a "hint" or nothing at all. "Little support" is not the same as no support, which is what we heard from others directly at Bing. Also, what does "little support" mean when it comes to the canonical tag? Does it mean that you treat the canonical tag as a 301 redirect or not? It can't mean you do both - can it? Maybe it means that if there is a canonical tag and a 301 redirect in place, doing the same action, Bing will treat it as a redirect (I am being sarcastic here).

I just don't get it.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Here is the weird Bing comment for the day. Brett Yount, the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, told webmasters to submit their site to Digg or Yahoo Buzz to help get their pages indexed. I kid you not!

A Bing Forums thread has Brett saying, and I quote:

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Of course this makes sense. Get a link from a popular site and a search engine will find that link and hopefully index your site/pages afterwards. But I just find it weird that a search representative would specifically name Digg and/or Buzz. I mean, why not mention something else or just talk about the concept in general. Brett could have said, to get your pages indexed quicker, make sure to get links from sites we crawl on a frequent basis.

One day Brett and I are going to meet in person and I hope he doesn't punch me out. ;-)

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Ever do a search on Bing and see shopping results come up, where one of the links are to a "guides" area? For example, search for [buy coffee maker] and you will see the following results:

There are two "guides" listed here for this query. The first goes to How Stuff Works and the second goes to .

A WebmasterWorld thread asks, how does one get to be placed in these guides. It is a good question, I am not sure. Is it purely algorithmic? Is it from a set database of guides only? I suspect these are trusted sites that are pre-coded to be considered "guides" and thus be listed for matching queries in Bing.

If you know anything more about these Bing shopping guides, let us know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread and an older Bing Forums thread has discussion from webmasters over the issue of Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot, crawling file names that do not exist on a specific site.

This reminders me of the ongoing issue of Bing creating fake referrals in webmaster log files. This has been going on for years, where Microsoft claims they have fixed it, but never really has.

In this specific case, it seems like Bing is creating file names on a specific site to crawl. Wel, they are not creating files, just trying to fetch pages that do not and never have existed on a specific site. I am not sure if this is a Bing issue or a webmaster issue.

A long time WebmasterWorld member explained the issue:

In what is apparently a rather old bad behavior, msnbot has a practice of regularly requesting totally manufactured URIs that appear to be designed to trigger 404 errors. Here are two sample log entries of the two styles of bogus URIs msnbot requests:

'65.55.207.126'¦Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:39:49 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/ADBF3C7AB534E8356F30D8AC05291640_00000.temp019f.html'¦''
'65.55.207.28'¦Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:46:22 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/000166709_00001.temp00be.html'¦''

The requests ALWAYS take on one of the formats above starting with either a 32byte GUID or a nine digit integer.

In the Bing thread, another person said:

For many many years, msnbot has been crawling my sites looking for files that have never existed... i'm trying to figure out why...
the filenames have changed slightly in recent times but they have been similar in structure since the beginning... they are something like 000092601_00002.temp0001.htm... in other words, 9 numbers underscore 5 numbers dot temp 4 numbers dot htm... the search for these is all over my server's directory tree...

I'll emphasize once more that these files have never existed on my site and i have no clue how msnbot may have picked them up...

Honestly, I feel bad that I am always beating up on Microsoft. I know they are new to the game, when you compare them to Google. But I have to report these issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Bing Forums.

There is this old and upsetting thread in the Bing Forums about how Bing handles the canonical tag. The thread is filled with misinformation. Matt McGee's post at Search Engine Land a week ago says it clearly.

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.

You got that right, 11 months ago, Google, Yahoo and Bing announced support for the Canonical tag. As far as I know, only Google really uses it and they even added cross domain canonical support this month. Where is Bing at this? Well, in the next several months they hope to support a single domain use of the canonical tag and hopefully soon after the cross domain support. So it would have taken Bing over a year since they announced support of this tag to actually support it?

I am not too upset about that, to be honest. What I am more upset about is that official Bing support representatives are pretty much lying in the Bing Forums. Brett Yount, the Product Manager of Bing Webmaster Center said:

accourding to our blog post, http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx, the canonical tag is used as a hint only.

No, it is not used as a hint or anything. It is not used period, not yet. Maybe in four months, but not yet.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

This is a hoax, this is not true, but it spread around the internet over the weekend and I found it pretty funny. Again, this is a comic, who did a skit of some sort. Microsoft confirmed this is not a real employee or ex-employee at Microsoft.

The video portrays a disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee describing how he was fired by Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, over not saying "Bing" with enthusiasm.

If you know the jokes about Ballmer, this is pretty funny.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are a few reports in a Bing Forum thread that adding a site to Bing Webmaster Tools might not work. Specifically, if the URL or domain contains a hyphen (dash) such as www.best-domain.com.

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster team confirmed the bug, saying:

Currently, we are having a few difficulties which I just received confirmation from the indexing team. They are currently working on it, but said that if you try a couple times, it should work. If not, and your site isn't in the index at all , please post on the not in index thread and I will work to get your home page (only) into the index.

I personally tried adding a domain with a hyphen and it worked for me on the first try. So maybe it is resolved or maybe those specific domains have other issues?

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster Team dropped a hint in the Bing Forums that they may add the Bing Page Score (similar to Google's PageRank) to the MSN Toolbar.

Bing has what they call Bing Page Score when you login to their Bing Webmaster Center. Someone asked in the thread, "is it possible to enable page rank in bing toolbar?"

Soon after, Brett Yount from Bing responded saying:

We might once we complete the rework of that tool, which will be Fall earliest. Good news is, there are some changes in the works due in May/June to many things important to the webmasters frequenting these forums.

So there are two things here:

(1) Bing's Page Score may come to their Toolbar.
(2) They will be reworking "that tool," which I believe is talking about Page Score specifically.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Here is one more oddity to add to Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot. Why on earth are people reporting that MSNBot is crawling the same page twice, once for the compressed version and then once again for the uncompressed version? Technically, it should probably only crawl once and it should opt for the compressed, gzip version - don't you think?

We have two threads complaining about this, one oldish one at WebmasterWorld and another at Bing Forums. Let me quote the Bing thread:

I've notice that bing is crawling each page of my website twice, first making an HTTP 1.1 request and getting a compressed response then immediately issuing an HTTP 1.0 request to receive the same page without gzip compression

The following lines from my log show the issue (there are thousands more similar occurrences):
65.55.207.74 - - [13/Dec/2009:14:58:42 +0000] "GET /specimen/235698/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1742 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.207.74 - - [13/Dec/2009:14:59:06 +0000] "GET /specimen/235698/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4259 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.106.209 - - [13/Dec/2009:15:03:08 +0000] "GET /specimen/250262/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1733 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.106.209 - - [13/Dec/2009:15:03:14 +0000] "GET /specimen/250262/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4164 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

This seems a waste of bandwidth and completely defeats the point of supporting http compression.

Indeed a waste of bandwidth and yes, it defeats the point of supporting HTTP compression.

A Bing representative, Brett Yount said:

could you please mail this information to bwmc@microsoft.com and I will get our crawling team to check it out?

But we have no confirmation from Bing on why this issue is occurring or when it will be fixed. Like I said, just one more oddity to add to MSNBot's crawl behavior.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Forums.

I spotted a useful tidbit for SEOs in the Bing Forums today. Brett Yount from Bing Webmaster Center team explained how Bing picks up on 301 redirects.

Brett said it can take two to three crawls from Bing to register a 301 redirect in their index. Brett said:

By design, our crawler usually takes 2-3 crawls before it registers the redirect.

I wonder how many crawls Google takes to do the same thing? I can see why you would want to wait at least for a second crawl to confirm a 301 redirect is indeed legit.

We had some reports recently that Bing is handling 301s much better now than they have in the past.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

We are one major step closer to Microsoft and Yahoo closing on their Micro-hoo search deal which started officially back in July. Yahoo announced on Friday that the details of the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft are final now.

Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation today announced that the companies have finalized and executed the definitive Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and License Agreement in accordance with the letter agreement announced in July.

The companies released the following joint statement:

"Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.

"Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010."

Now, all they wait for is for approval from the various bodies of law in the U.S. and abroad.

A Bing powered Yahoo Search is just another step closer.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Bing went offline for about 30 minutes. I captured a screen shot of Microsoft's search engine having issues about mid-way through. Here it is:

TechCrunch said it was down for about 30 minutes. Twitter was buzzing about the news, and there were threads at Bing Community & WebmasterWorld.

Bing tweeted when they came back online:

This may be the first time that Bing.com has been down in its relatively short history.

Forum discussion at Bing Community & WebmasterWorld.

Update: Bing blog has a post on this.

Microsoft made buzz yesterday with the announcements on the Bing Maps blog and Bing Search Blog.

Greg Sterling explains it well at Search Engine Land as "Bing Maps breaks new ground in online mapping even as it plays a bit of catch up with Google."

The augmented reality comes in where Microsoft overlays data on those maps in a more social way. Microsoft explains:

Photosynth and Silverlight are the underlying technologies in Bing Maps that connect everything and help provide the more seamless experience. Based on Seadragon and Photo Tourism concepts, Photosynth lets us literally “stitch” together photographs to provide more realistic view of locations as they appear in real life. Photosynth-enabled Streetside imagery is built on geometric models that are reconstructed underneath the imagery to provide a truly 3D experience that shows locations as they are in real life.

The screen shots at the various blogs are neat, the only downside is the requirement to install Silverlight (I am a mac user). For more coverage of this, see Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Let me summarize some of the news around News Corp, Google and Microsoft Bing over the past couple weeks. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp is upset that Google indexes his news sites content without paying a fee for doing so. Google tells Murdoch, if you don't want in our index and the traffic that it sends to you, just tell us in your robots.txt file and we won't index you. Murdoch then says, he may just do that if Google does pay up.

You see this game?

Now, Microsoft comes in and talks a deal with News Corp to pay for indexing their content, if they de-list themselves from Google. Got it?

Honestly, I don't think there is anyone better to comment on this type of topic then Danny Sullivan. He has years of real newspaper experience and knows search like no one else. He wrote a piece named Thoughts On A "Killer" Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An "OPEC For News".

I was browsing a WebmasterWorld thread and it seems like there are very strong opinions on both sides. Let me quote a few:

I guess MS has decided that if you can't beat 'em, (try to) sabotage 'em!

Google is so engraved in society today that building a better search engine(not saying Bing is) would not beat Google. Drastic measures are the only way to compete with Google.

It is a PRIVILEGE for a search engine to list a (good) website and Google has been taking it for granted for too long..

Anyway we all loose big time if there ever is a search engine war where sites decide to be listed in one search engine and not in another one.

I think all the perspective has been said already, so I will just end here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Bing Search blog wrote a blog post on link building for "smart webmasters." A WebmasterWorld thread is currently dissecting that blog post, piece by piece.

Martinibuster, Roger Montti, took the time to pull out the key points of the blog post:

• You contact webmasters of other, related websites and let them know your site exists. If the value that you have worked so hard to instill in your site is evident to them, they will assist their own customers by linking back to your site. That, my friend, is the essence of link building.
• Relevance is important to end users... We see the content they possess and the content you possess. If there is a clear disconnect, the value of that inbound link is significantly diminished, if not completely disregarded.
• If relevance is important, the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best of all. Sites that possess great content, that have a history in their space, that have earned tons of relevant, inbound links - basically, the sites who are authorities in their field - are considered authoritative sites.
• When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

There is some great discussion around this blog post at WebmasterWorld, so it is probably worth a look.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A month ago, we reported on early reports that Microsoft Bing Finally Figuring Out 301 Redirects? Yes, we ended in a question-mark because we were not too confident back then.

Since the November '09 Bing Search update, more people are confirming that Bing is now handling 301 redirects properly.

Historically, Bing use to handle some 301 redirects like 404. How could they do this? I am not sure - but that is what webmasters report. Now, since the update and some saw this a month ago, Bing fixed that issue.

Senior member, CainIV said:

A whole slough of 301'-ed pages that had links to them but were previously stuck in the abyss have suddenly gained the credit that they deserved and have moved forward.

Hopefully all webmasters are taking notice of this now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is some early discussion over at WebmasterWorld that Microsoft Bing has updated their search index. Many webmasters are discussing changes in rankings in this and other forums (which are hard to link to).

Here is what WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster wrote:

Bing engineers may need to refine their trust algos. I'm seeing a SERP where Bing is giving a poor quality subdomain a pass because the main domain has a high amount of inbound links (nearly a million). I think Bings method for determining sites likely to be authoritative needs tweaking.

Interestingly, Bing produces another result not seen in the other search engines that is actually pretty good.

For this site, I can tell you Bing sends up more traffic than Yahoo.

The last Bing update we reported was in late October.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago, Bing announced they have taken Bing UK (www.bing.co.uk) out of beta. They basically said, you can now get more relevant UK results when in the UK and searching in the UK. Here is a snippet from the blog post:

When you search for Football, what kind of answers do you expect to find. Well, I guess it depends on where you are doing the asking, if you are in the UK you probably don’t want to see NFL schedules. You probably mean what we in the US call soccer. Well today, millions of searchers in the UK can rest assured that Bing knows what they are talking about. We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag. We want to congratulate our pals over in the UK on a huge milestone.

A HighRankings Forum thread is taking issue with this. Two searchers from the UK were not satisfied with the localized version of Bing. They said:

I did a study yesterday and the example they provided (Football) still returns the NFL - something they said that the UK 'wouldn't be interested in'. The universal search results are even worse with US today results of 'American Football' being returned (and two images of an American Football).

You are certainly right, doesn't look like Bing UK has any UK inteligence, I just did a simple search for the word 'analyse' , and the no.1 result returned was spelt with a 'z' , looks like Bing has a long, long way to go yet eh Andy!

I personally tried a search for football in Bing.com and Bing.co.uk and I am seeing tailored results for each region. Yes, NFL.com comes up in the UK, but not in the top result. Since I am not from the UK, it is hard for me to judge.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

I was all giddy when Wolfram|Alpha demo'ed back in May. The search engine, a fact engine, is filled with so much information and the results are provided in such great detail that this is one of the most, if not the most, useful publicly accessible fact engines available. As you can tell, I am a huge fan. Like I said then, it does not replace a Google but I know when to go to Wolfram and use it for specific queries.

Bing finally officially announced a deal with them where they are syndicating Wolfram|Alpha's data in their own search results. I personally do not see it live yet but here is a picture of how it might work:

I think Google should sign up with Wolfram as well. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and believe it or not, also at Google Webmaster Help.

I am a big fan of the Bing Cashback program but on the merchant side, I was never to clear on how that worked. I did some research and merchants can sign up here to be included in the Cashback program.

There are actually detailed merchant guides (PDF) and optimization tips (PDF) for Bing shopping available.

At DigitalPoint Forums, I spotted one merchant who was kicked out of the program. Honestly, I have never seen a merchant complain online that his merchant Cashback account was terminated. This is the email he received from Microsoft:

Dear ***,

Thank you for your participation in the Bing cashback program.

This letter is to notify you that pursuant to Section 12 of the Bing cashback Merchant Agreement, Microsoft is terminating your Bing cashback Merchant Agreement and DinoDirect's participation in the Bing cashback program.

As per Section 12 of the Bing cashback Merchant Agreement:

Upon termination, suspension or discontinuation of the Program or Merchant's participation in the Program: (a) all Listings will be promptly removed; (b) Merchant remains responsible for a period of 15 days for tracking Qualifying Sales that occurred prior to termination and paying the associated Sales Payouts; and (c) after the conclusion of such period, Microsoft shall refund any outstanding amounts in Merchant's Account.

Clearly, the site that was terminated was Dino Direct, but why exactly, is not clear. I was unable to find the Bing cashback merchant agreement.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

We have more MSNBot troubles to unfortunately bring to you. Microsoft Bing's spider, MSNBot, is apparently not listening to directives they should be listening to. In this case, it is the crawl delay command, where a couple users are claiming Microsoft Bing's MSNBot is not honoring. There is a thread on the topic at Bing Forums and no Microsoft representative has come in to clarify yet.

We know that Microsoft wrote both in 2008 and 2009 that Webmasters can add the crawl delay directive in their robots.txt file and it should slow the bot down.

In this case, these webmasters are using delays of 5 and 10, with no recourse from MSNBot. Take a look at events.berkeley.edu/robots.txt and you will see one example. But these webmasters are reporting extreme high crawl rates from MSNBot, which is not uncommon.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

The buzz of the day is that Microsoft unveiled a new home page design for MSN. You can see the new design at preview.msn.com. Let's compare the current and the preview:

Current:

Preview:

So much more refreshing! As Greg Sterling noted, the MSN portal drives nearly 50% of Bing queries - that is significant.

The MSN Blog takes us back through the years, starting from 1995 through today - looking at the various MSN designs.

Here is a video from the design team on the changes:

Overall, I think many are happy with the new design.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One thing I always see in the search optimization forums are complaints about how Microsoft Bing handles 301 redirects. I actually stopped covering the complaints because I saw them all too often. Today, I have some possible good news.

Steve, a senior member at WebmasterWorld posted a thread at WebmasterWorld that he believes Bing has finally figured out how to handle 301 redirects. He said:

MSN/Bing appears to have finally figured out how to follow 301 redirects, discarding the old URL and indexing/not-penalizing the destination URLs. This has lead to a lot more URLs from older authority domains coming into the index, and a pretty huge improvement in Bing's results, including ranking the best pages for a domain for a query instead of second and third choices.

If this continues I see it as a fix of one of the two main weaknesses of Bing compared to google (with the other being a smaller index of obscure stuff).

Finally, some very significant positive news from Bing... unless it all reverts again one of these days and all these 301 destination pages disappear again.

I have not seen any other reports of positive signs of Bing's 301 handling, but this is a good early sign.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Seven days ago, we reported on a Bing Search index update that many began noticing. Well, it seems like the WebmasterWorld thread has been updated by a webmaster that watches Bing closely.

This webmaster has noticed a totally new update on Bing and the Bing search results. The webmaster, textex, said:

I am seeing and even different set of results now. We improved nicely in rankings only to drop down to page 2-3. Anyone else seeing this?

Have you noticed a change from last week to this week on Bing? And traffic changes? Any ranking differences?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Most search spiders have been known to get a bit crawl happy from time to time. But the most complaints over time come from MSNBot which tends to often get out of hand and send their spiders on individuals sites are rampant rates. What is the issue if spiders are crawling your site? Well, no issue unless they crawl your site at a point where it hurts your server and resources. Spiders need to tame themselves and behave nicely to the web servers, which MSNBot has been known, on occasion, not to do.

Most recently, a WebmasterWorld has reports from a couple webmasters that MSNBot is again, not behaving, and crawling sites way too much.

I decided to check our forums here and noticed that of the 23 search bots active on my forum, 19 of them were from Bing, MSNBot and 2 were GoogleBot and the final 2 were Yahoo Slurp. So, of the spiders on my forum, about 82% of them were MSNBot. Others are reporting similar numbers or worse.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Watching the search news yesterday was pretty interesting. First, there were tons of rumors that Microsoft will be integrating Twitter data into Bing. Then the news broke on that where Bing confirmed the news. It launched, in limited form, at bing.com/twitter.

Shortly after, Google also confirmed a deal with Twitter to get their data as well and the news sites went nuts.

Yes, Twitter is licensing out the "firehose" of the tweets to search engines. Bing was doing something like this on a limited basis with Twitter in Bing search on some searches. Yahoo was/is reportedly in similar negotiations with Twitter as well.

In summary, clearly the search engines find the content within Twitter to be valuable. For more on this topic, see the stream of reports from Search Engine Land:

• Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter
• Live Blog: Marissa Mayer Speaking At Web 2.0
• Google & Twitter Have A Deal, Too
• Live Blog: Qi Lu Speaking At Web 2.0
• Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
• Bing To Do Deal With Twitter, Launch Its Own Twitter Search

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Bing Community.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: October 20, 2009"

Five days ago, we alluded to a possible Bing search index update when Microsoft fixed the issues with the Bing Webmaster Tools and blamed the issue on an "update to the search index." But no Webmasters really made a big stink about an update, so I did not write a single post on that alone.

Now I see WebmasterWorld thread with confirmed reports from real webmasters taking notice of an update on Microsoft's search engine, Bing.

Two senior members noticed the update. Billy S. said:

As I hit the enter key, I'm seeing two completely different SERPS on Bing - almost alternating. Anyone else seeing this?

Textex confirmed Billy's findings saying, "I am seeing different results too. Looks like an update."

The last Bing search index update was some time in August 2009, at least the last one we noticed.

Do you notice a change in your rankings and/or traffic from Bing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It kind of makes you wonder how important Bing Webmaster Tools is to Microsoft when it takes them over three days to fix a bug that completely makes the tools unusable.

Monday morning, we reported that Bing Webmaster Tools had an unexpected error which disallowed webmasters from accessing any of their verified domains. Many threads and complaints in the Bing forums, amongst others, were created.

It took two days for the Bing forum representative to acknowledge the bug in the forums. Brett Yount posted a thread at the Bing Community over two days after the first report of the bug. He said:

As you are probably aware, the tools are currently down. We are working to correct this ASAP.

Then finally, yesterday at around 10am, three days after the first report of the bug, Microsoft fixed the issue. Here is what Brett said:

I just verified that the tools are running again. Though I can't get into specifics, it looks like the problem was caused by an update to the search index. Needless to say, we are working to make sure more issues such as this do not happen in the near future.

Got that, an update to the search index caused this bug. So there was a search index update that seemed to go unnoticed for the most part. Well, there are some minor threads discussing some issues with the new index, but for the most part, it went unnoticed. That update, caused Webmaster Tools to fail and it took over three days for Microsoft to fix it.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Michael Gray noticed that a search for [Perez Hilton] in Microsoft's search engine, Bing, returns a set of pictures and a single search result (perezhilton.com). Here is a screen shot:

The question is why is Bing hiding everything else? They show tons of results for [Paris Hilton] and other 'celebrities,' why not Perez?

Stefan Weitz from the Bing team commented on Michael's blog saying it is by design. He said:

Yes – that is by design. However, if you click on the “see other results containing Perez Hilton” the rest of the algo web results appear. We carefully monitor these “Best Match” results to make sure we aren’t firing this result type too frequently – let us know if you have feedback!

Yes, you can click on the Search for other results containing Perez Hilton to bring up standard web results. But why show only the "best match" when there are plenty of other great matches?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

If you try logging into Bing Webmaster Tools, you will be greeted by a message that reads "We are experiencing an issue processing your request at this time." But Bing does tell you that the "Webmaster Center Team has been notified of the error and will work to resolve it. Try again in a few minutes." But trying again in a few minutes won't help, because it has been an issue over the weekend.

The issue seemed to have started yesterday, Sunday, at 5am (EST). Here is a picture:

This comes less than a month after the Bing Webmaster Tools add site bug that wouldn't allow webmaster to add or validate sites on the tool.

Bing has yet to confirm the issue, but I assume as the team (who I believe is based in Seattle -8 GMT) comes into the office today (today is Columbus day) they will get to fixing it.

Forum discussion at Bing Community and DigitalPoint Forums.

15 days ago, Bing launched visual search, if you haven't heard about it, click the link and watch the video demo.

Today, people are noticing that Bing has added a link to visual search directly from the Bing home page. So I compared a Bing home page image I had from a month ago, to what I see there today, and I see Bing has added two new links. They added the visual search link and also a link to "more."

Here is a picture from September 1st, ignore the arrow, just focus on the links on the left:

Here is a picture from today:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread once again confirms that Google ignores the geo-meta tags. Those tags somewhat look like this and use to serve the purpose of telling search engines where the site is based:

<meta name="geo.placename" content="United States" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="x;x" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="usa" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="x,x" />

Google ignores them, and has for a really long time. JohnMu from Google confirmed this most recently in the thread:

We generally ignore geo-meta tags like that because we've found that they're generally incorrect (copy & pasted from a template, etc).

But we had confirmation of this when wrote that Bing relies on these geo-meta tags to determine a site's location. And time and time again, there are webmasters who find there site targeted to the wrong country because of that template issue. In that post, Google's Matt Cutts said the same thing:

Historically, meta tags for language and country have been less reliable than inferring the language or country directly. For example, lots of webmaster also just copy/paste from a friend's template without checking the meta tag values. The unreliability of the meta tags is why Google tends not to use them or give them less weight.

So three webmaster points here:

(1) Google ignore the geo-meta tag
(2) Bing currently uses the geo-meta tag
(3) Be careful when you copy templates or use pre-existing templates

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If you go to the Bing Webmaster Tools and login, then try to "add a site" to the list of sites you have rights to manage, you will get a page cannot be displayed type of page.

Here is a picture of the error I am seeing, as well as many other webmasters:

There are dozens of threads on this issue at the Bing Forums and will likely be dozens more soon. There is also a thread at WebmasterWorld with complaints.

Microsoft is aware of the issue and hope to get it resolved soon. I hope it is resolved by the time this post goes live, which is about 20 hours after the first report of it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Forums.

I guess those Bing commercials are indeed working. CNet reports on a Neilson ratings survey that claims Microsoft's Bing search engine has captured 10% share.

Here is the break down:

Table 1: Top 10 Search Providers for August 2009, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

Notice Yahoo dropped 4.2 percent from the previous month, but keep in mind, looking at month-to-month numbers is dangerous in this space.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

With all the on going issues with MSNBot not behaving, I am not too surprised to see more complaints about the little spider.

New confirmed reports from Bing Forums shows that MSNBot is hiding itself under the UserAgent of Mozilla/4.0. How does this person know that it is MSNBot? Two reason, it is "crawler-acting-like" and also because it is in the same range of IP adresses as MSNBot.

Brett Yount from the Microsoft Bing team confirmed the issue saying:

We've received word from a few other sources concerning this. Our team is reviewing it and will let me know as soon as they have an update. Please be assured that it is not our intention to misrepresent the bot or cause undo problems for webmasters.

In addition to this confirmed report, we have a webmaster in WebmasterWorld complaining that MSNBot fails the best business practices of reverse DNS lookup validating. In November 2006, Microsoft added a method to validate MSNBot is indeed MSNBot by allowing reverse DNS checking of the IP. That began to fail in December 2007, which was confirmed shortly after. Then again, in March 2008 the reverse DNS complaints came back. This is a brand new report after not hearing complaints for a while now. There has not been confirmation of this from Microsoft.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums and WebmasterWorld.

BT.com, a major UK portal, was powered by Yahoo Search, but is now being powered by Google Search. Why is this a big deal? Well, the portal is a partnership of some sort between Yahoo and BT, i.e. it is hosted at bt.yahoo.com.

Now we all know that Yahoo and Microsoft have made a big deal, where Microsoft will hopefully take control of all of Yahoo's search technology and power that side of their business.

So why did Yahoo partner up with Google on this portal and not Microsoft Bing?

This is not recent news, I reported this back in August based on a ConnectedInternet tip. Here is a screen capture:

Eventually, Yahoo said all their properties will be "powered by Bing Search."

A WebmasterWorld thread said that BT members just received emails from BT saying:

Your BT Yahoo! Search is now powered by Google, the UK’s most popular search engine.

This shouldn't confuse anyone down the road.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I never understand it when I see trolls come into forums, owned and managed daily by search engine representatives, and spam them. It is clear that these forums are crawling with people who can seriously impact your site's ranking in that search engine - but they are clueless to that fact?

Two recent examples for you:

(1) A Bing Forum thread discusses one member who has been just spamming the forum with link drops to his site. Literally every post of his, is a link to his site. The posts rarely answer questions related to the thread, they are just clogging up the forum.

One active webmaster finally called him out and then warned him:

And a side note, you really think it's a good idea to do this in the forum from a search engine company? I am sure they can add and remove URLs from the index if they really want this...

(2) Some guy came into the Google Webmaster Help forums and asked outright to do link exchanges. I mean, come on! Besides for Google clearly not approving such methods of link building, the forum is filled with people who absolutely hate exchanging links with others.

One of the main DO NOTs of SEO is DO NOT raise a red flag on your site. Coming into an official search engine forum that clearly is monitored by search reps and spamming it with links to your site, doesn't just raise a red flag, but gives them a bulls eye. Now, if you are doing this to a competitor, that is a different evil story.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum and Google Webmaster Help.

All that chatter of Bing 2.0 I guess was about Microsoft launching a new search feature to let you narrow your search results down through filters and images - i.e. visually.

Here is a video demo of how it works:

As you can see, for the most part, this is structured data and doesn't appear to be data from unstructured parts of the web. In any event, this is a really nice and easy way to narrow the results down. Elisabeth Osmeloski at Search Engine Land has a pretty large write up on the new feature.

The main issue for me is that it requires Silverlight to run, which I don't have on my main machine.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The years and years of Microsoft polluting web logs with fake referrer data, which they have 'fixed' numerous times, including a couple weeks ago.

We had confirmed reports from webmasters that Bing was no longer showing up in the log files with fake referrers. But I am seeing a new report that the log files are showing Microsoft Bing IP addresses in them but without referrer data.

An updated Bing Forum thread has one webmaster explaining the situation:

Unfortunately, the problem is back in another shape!

I have almost the same number of fake referrer hits from bing but in a different shape: no referrer. So, the stats show me the pages visited, no referrer and the IPs (microsoft's) are like: 65.55.110.21, 65.55.110.110, 65.55.107.196

So this does not generate fake keyword referrer data, but it does spike up Bing's referrer traffic for specific pages. That is assuming the webmaster who posted this is correct.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Over the past few weeks, I have been noticing threads pop up in the Bing forums with complaints from webmasters that Bing's bot, aka MSNBot is not honoring their robots.txt directives.

It was not just one thread, but at least four. They include one from yesterday over here, one started on September 3rd over here, one from September 1 over here and one started on August 25th over here.

I ignored the first three, trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. Hoping it is a webmaster issue or someone spoofing MSNBot. But four threads on the same topic, all within a few weeks of each other does stand out as a possible issue.

I have personally not confirmed the issue, since I have no interest in blocking MSNBot from crawling any parts of my sites - but others don't like Bing as much as I do.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums here, here, here and over here.

There are some complaints in the Bing Forums that the Bing mouse over box, which we discussed yesterday, has a weird error. When you mouse over certain listings, Bing may show the following type of error in the box:

WARNING 2: session_destroy() [function.session-destroy]: trying to destroy uninitialized session in/usr/home/mitetsn/public-html/cart/includes/functions/sessions.php on line 146

The session destroy warning seems to be coming from Bing's handling of the site. Ovi in the forums gave us a bit more insight into the technical issue. He said:

session_destroy destroys all of the data associated with the current session. It does not unset any of the global variables associated with the session, or unset the session cookie. To use the session variables again, session_start() has to be called.

So it is an problem from the Bing script. I think that the technicians are working on it already.

You can replicate the issue by hovering your mouse over the first listing for this search.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

A Bing Forum thread asks if there is a way to update the quick preview box (more info box) found on some of the search results in the Bing search page. The quick preview box is the box on the right side of the search result listing that pops up when you hover your mouse over a listing. Here is a picture:

The first listing for a search on [rustybrick] at Bing is showing not the most optimal information in that quick preview. Here is a screen shot:

The second listing is the same URL, but with tracking parameters added on and for some reason, the quick preview box has much more optimal text:

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to change the information shown in this box? That is what people are asking in the Bing Forum thread. In fact, Bing representative Brett Yount said it might be coming to a Bing Webmaster Tools section near you. Brett said:

Currently there is no way to change that information. That may change in the next release, but I do not have an ETA.

Now that would be a neat feature.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

One of the most talked about features of Bing, Microsoft search engine, is not the search features at all but rather the pictures they show on their home page. It truly keeps people coming back every day. But sometimes people miss the picture shown on a day and they want to go back in history and find it.

Because of that, a while back, Microsoft added a feature to see past images. They added a mouse over feature, where you hover your mouse over the right bottom corner of the image and it lets you scroll back in time to see past images. Here is a picture of that scroll feature:

The issue is, for a certain period of time, that feature went missing for many. In fact, I have been noticing several threads on this topic, including this one at the Bing Forums complaining it is missing. I personally always saw it, but then I noticed how this is working in the US, where I am based, but not elsewhere. One user said:

It's only working for the US version. Not for the other, inluding the Canadian (out-of-beta) version!

Kristin from Microsoft replied that she will "make sure to pass along to the Home page team." So if you cannot see it, hopefully you will be able to see it soon.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Some users have noticed a bug with Bing Mobile at m.bing.com, where Microsoft is loading the wrong language for that user.

Microsoft confirmed the bug as a "language display bug" in the Bing Forums. An apparent Microsoft Bing representative listed out the issue as:

We have a known issue that affects a small percentage of people using Bing on their mobile devices, where Bing shows up in the wrong language.

Microsoft both notes how you can help them fix the issue as well as fix the issue on your device. Microsoft said first asked that you help them troubleshoot the issue by going to http://m.bing.com and then type in the query “BINGLANGTEST” and then send them an email (bingmob@microsoft.com) with the date/time you encountered the issue.

Then to fix your issue, just go to http://m.bing.com/?lc=en-US on your mobile device. This will reset the language back to English.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Brett Yount from Microsoft's Bing Webmaster team has commented here and in a Bing Forum thread saying the issue with the fake referrers being generated by MSNBot has finally been fixed. By finally, I mean, an issue dating back over two years.

Brett said:

Thanks to our webmaster community and followers we are happy to share an update to the referrer issue that you may have heard or read about recently. First of all, we’d like to express our sincere apologies that this referrer issue continued past the August 20th date when we explicitly stated that it was fixed. With the support of many webmasters' data, our crawling team was able to pinpoint the root cause and deploy a new fix to stop the referrer string in production. This fix has been verified in all of our production beds.

There are confirmed reports by webmasters that the issue is no longer being seen and that going forward their log files are no longer being polluted with fake referrer data.

I am happy to hear reports that this is fixed, but you can't blame me for being a bit skeptical that this issue might creep up again. I mean, Microsoft fixed this issue at least three times in the past. I certainly hope it is fixed forever.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

I normally don't get upset when I report about bugs with search engines, it is what I do. But I am really getting upset with Microsoft and their webmaster support with Bing, really. For the umpteenth time, Microsoft said they fixed the fake referrer issue that has been plaguing webmasters since 2007 and they have lied again. Well, maybe the word lied is a strong word, maybe Microsoft simply has no idea how to manage a search spider or crawl the web?

The day after Microsoft said they fixed the issue with fake referral data showing up in log files, webmasters said the issue is still there. We have updated threads at Bing Forums and WebmasterWorld, the issue is still going on.

I am sorry for being so upset about this, but this is seriously a bit out of hand. Why? Well, we reported this issue so many times, here is an archive:

• Microsoft Claims To Fix Fake Referrals or "Single Word Query" Complaint, August 20, 2009
• Bing Classifies Cloaking Detection as "Single Word Query" Issue, August 10, 2009
• More Cloaking Tests In Form Of Fake Referrers From Microsoft Bing?, August 5, 2009
• Microsoft Disables Fake Referral "Feature" Temporarily, April 29, 2009
• Microsoft To Fix Fake Referrer Data From Live Search, April 22, 2009
• MSN Live Sending Odd Referrals -- QBHP -- to Websites, July 24, 2008
• Microsoft Live Search Continues Referral Spam Tests With MSLIVSOP?, January 14, 2008
• Live Search's Spam Fake Referrals Were Cloaking Tests, Says Microsoft, December 4, 2007
• Microsoft Live Search Spam-Like Referrals Are Still Occurring, November 19, 2007
• Microsoft Live Search's Strange Spam-Like Referrals Are Official Tests, September 6, 2007
• Weird Referrals From Microsoft's Live Search?, August 17, 2007

Now these are only issues specific to fake referrers clogging up our log files. This doesn't mention the issues with Cashback rewards, or Bing clicking on their own search ads, or NOODP tag, the geotargeting issues, crawling too fast, adding pound signs to URLs and much more.

So I am a bit upset with Bing Webmaster support.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Update: After much pushing here and other blogs I write on, Microsoft has said they finally fixed the issue. They didn't explain why there was an issue, but they did say they fixed the issue. More details over here.

Google seems to be indexing Bing search results. Take a look at this query and you will see some of the Google search results leading to Bing search results.

So I decided to check to see if Yahoo, Ask.com or even Bing themselves were doing the same. It seems like Ask.com is also doing this, but Yahoo and Bing are not indexing Bing results.

Google doesn't like to see search results in search results so this is not common to see in Google.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Microsoft Bing representative, Brett Yount, said that they have rolled out a fix for the fake referrals or single word query issues people have been noticing. Brett said:

We released a fix last night that should take care of these issues. If you are still having problems, let me know and I will investigate.

I am just not confident that this is resolved for the long haul. Why? Well, history shows that this has been going on since 2007 and has popping up time and time again since.

Plus, I was hoping for an official explanation on what this issue was, and I have yet to see one.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Back in 2007, when Bing was named Live Search, Microsoft introduced their flavor of Google PageRank and cleverly named it "Page Score." If you verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools at bing.com/webmaster, you should be able to see your Page Score value, X out of 5 green bars.

This site has 5 green bars for the domain and our top five pages:

But what does "Page Score" actually mean? A Bing Forum thread asked that question and a Bing representative replies saying:

It is a rough indication of how we view your site pages. Note that this score is only relevent to your site and does not track well in our index.

I looked up what the help section of webmaster tools says and it explains page score as:

Provides a measurement of how authoritative Bing views your webpage to be, with five green boxes being the highest rating and five empty boxes being the lowest. This is based on many of the same factors Bing uses to determine static rank, but isn't directly comparable.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a blog post from the Cuil blog (Cuil is that new search engine) named So how is Bing doing? I found it very interesting that Cuil did a blog post on how good Bing is. In any event, I decided not to cover it, probably due to a lack of time.

Now that Tedster mentioned it in a WebmasterWorld thread and pulled out four main points from the blog post, I figured I brief on this. The four main points are:

• Bing had 2.9% spam, Google had 2.56% spam, while Yahoo had 4.9%
• Bing prefers URL matches more
• Bing seems to prefer pages where the term occurs with its first letter capitalized
• Bing does less term-rewriting than Google.

What I found interesting was Tedster's comments on the last point. Tedster said:

If Google is going to lose ground to Bing/Yahoo it will be in this area -- too much giving you what they THINK you mean instead of what you actually typed.

Now, I won't argue with that statement, but it is interesting in that this was most people's number on complaint about Microsoft's products. Everyone joked and still jokes that Bill Gates or Windows knows better with auto complete features. And yes, I see more and more complaints that Google is changing the searchers search query, even though the searcher does not want to search for what Google thinks they should search for.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am a big fan of Microsoft's Cashback program, as a consumer. As a searcher, I find it a bit hard to use - although it is getting better. But I have been watching the Bing forums and it just seems like this Cashback program is not only very expensive (giving cash to customers for purchases, up to 50% of those purchases) but it a big headache.

Looking at just one section of the Bing forums, I see 35% of the 20 threads there are about the Cashback program. 7 of 20 of those threads are people complaining about it. Why? Well, sometimes it is just the consumer doing it wrong (like I said, it isn't easy). Other times, it is a merchant bug and sometimes it is a Microsoft issue.

In my case, Microsoft is giving me the second half of my Cashback earnings. But not only is this costing money, in regards to the rewards, they have to deal with bugs and customers who don't even qualify for the rewards. Is all this worth the effort in order to promote Bing? That is up for them to decide, but overall, I think they have really stepped up the communication and awareness about this offering.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Update: On August 19th, Microsoft sent me a check for the difference missing in my Cashback rewards. Microsoft actually used FedEx priority overnight services to send me that check, which was nice, but not necessary.

Yesterday, I had a quick chat with a Microsoft Bing webmaster representative, where I asked him several questions that have been recently buzzing around the webmaster community.

One of those questions was, is MSNbot clicking on Bing adCenter ads? The answer, he said, was yes - they are. He was quick to explain that any of those clicks are not being charged to the advertiser.

Again, no advertiser should be charged for MSNBot clicking on their ads. They are all filtered out and have no chance of being charged to the advertiser.

That is great, right? Well, no. What about the analytical data that skews the numbers. If these bots are clicking on and indexing (I've seen examples of tracking URLs being indexed) then it can terribly skew your analytical data. Click through rates, impressions, conversion metrics and so on, will be all skewed. There were recent studies that showed Bing ads convert higher and drive a higher CTR. But honestly, if you have bots messing with data, and clicking on ads, that CTR value can be greatly skewed.

I asked Microsoft what they are going to do about this? I said, can't you go through your index, match up any adCenter URLs and replace them with maybe the landing page URL? I know that often won't solve the issue, but I want to hear solutions. Microsoft said they will get back to me on this issue.

Forum discussion continued at Bing Forums.

Last week, we reported on what appears to be more cloaking tests by Bing, where referrer data for websites are being spammed (by Microsoft) with fake data. There have been more and more complaints about this in the Bing forums.

A new thread sprung up in the Bing Forums where Brett Yount, program manager for Bing, said:

We are rolling out a new spider, so it is possible that might be causing your activity increase. If this is becoming more of a problem, please send me a mail at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and "single word query complaint" in the subject line and I will investigate.

Clearly, Microsoft now has a name for this issue internally. They are calling this a "complaint" but more importantly, it might be isolated to single word queries. In our example last week, the single word in that case was "donate". In the new thread, it is "copper," plus other undisclosed terms, not specifically mentioned by webmasters.

There is no official explanation from Microsoft on this issue, as of yet.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Less then two weeks after a July Bing update, Bing is reportedly updating again.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters noticing major shifts in the search results at Microsoft's Bing. Here is some of the feedback from the thread:

Definitely seeing a shift across the board. Biggest change I can pinpoint is a continued decrease in relevancy of KIDs (keywords in domain). More than 80% of the top 500 KWs I track showed movement (mostly positive for me and mostly displacing a lot of KIDs results).

Yes, looks like an update - and Bing traffic converts well with certain demographics. Now I've gotta scramble to do some long over-due site updates because some pages popped up out of nowhere.

So if you notice an increase or decline in your referrers from Bing today, you know why.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Oh, I have to add here that Bing announced the "Bing Jingle" winner, personally, I don't like it:

A recent thread from the Bing Forums reports one webmaster noticing 150 plus referrers from MSNBot with the referring search query of "donate." They always come from a search result of www.bing.com/search?q=donate. The thing is, his site doesn't rank well in Bing for donate. So why is he seeing this he asked?

Historically, Bing (Microsoft/Live Search/MSN Search) is known for using referral requests to attempt to find cloaked pages or find search spam. Since April 2007, Microsoft has been sending weird referrals to many webmasters. They were known as internal cloaking tests designed by Microsoft's search quality team. But even though they promised to cool it with those visible tests, it came back time and time again.

Program Manager from the Bing Webmaster Team said, "I have an idea of what's causing this and trying to fix it on the backend." What that idea is, he did not disclose, but there is speculation that these are more cloaking spam tests from Microsoft.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a senior webmaster claiming that in some cases, Microsoft Bing is ignoring the <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> tag. The noarchive tag basically tells the search engine not to display a "cache" result in the search listings.

This webmaster said it some cases Bing is honoring the tag and in other cases Bing is not. He said there is no rhyme or reason to this, "it's inconsistent, and I don't find this to be true across all the websites I've got those meta tags on," he said. Of course, I don't have an example, being the thread is from WebmasterWorld.

But recently, we have seen many complaints about how Microsoft's Bing handles certain webmaster/search protocols. From not honoring NOODP tag, to not effectively using the meta language tag, to other geo problems and crawling too fast, including clicking on search ads, as well as adding pound signs to URLs - Bing has had its recent share of criticism.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Shawn Hogan, DigitalPoint's founder, has posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums clearly showing his frustration with MSNBot, Microsoft Bing's search crawler. He is upset that the bot is crawling too much, too fast - causing an unnecessary spike in load on his servers.

Based on his metrics, he noticed MSNBot/2.0b was crawling at a rate of 8Mbit per second, all day, every day.

Microsoft did recently announced that this beta crawler, 2.0b (b is for beta), will be ramping activity and it seems like DigitalPoint was hit by this. You might be also, so make sure to check out your bot activity and as the Microsoft post says:

If you have any feedback for us on either the existing or the new MSNBot, or on any other matters pertaining to crawling your website, please post your comments and questions in our crawling/indexing forum. Our Webmaster Center forums moderator will follow-up with you ASAP. Please include in your forum post the identity of the user agent that is the source of your concern so we can help you that much faster. Thank you!

Microsoft's beta bots have a history of causing trouble for webmasters.

Forum discussion DigitalPoint Forums.

Earlier, we noted how Bing, Microsoft's search engine, relied heavily on the meta language tag. Google's Matt Cutts even commented why using that method can lead to issues (don't you love it when the search engines nitpick at each other). In any event, Bing's geo targeting capabilities continue to plague some webmasters.

A WebmasterWorld senior member started a thread at WebmasterWorld with his issue with Bing's capability in classifying where his site is targeting. He said:

I've just been testing my most important keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 in both Show All and Only From The United Kingdom. All my sites are UK registered and UK hosted.

Show All and I'm #1 for my .com directory site and #2 for my .eu B & M site.

Only From the UK and I'm #1 for my .com directory site and no .eu site in sight anywhere!

Is Bing not aware that the UK is in the EU?

No, Bing is not aware that your site should be in the UK. Not yet at least. Maybe the BingHoo deal will give them some intellectual property on how to geo target a bit better.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a thread I have been watching at the Bing Community where one member said that he had log files that shows MSNBot (Microsoft Bing's crawler) is clicking on Microsoft adCenter search ads, possibly charging him for those clicks.

This advertiser set up very specific tracking URLs for the adCenter campaigns and noticed that MSNBot came up for triggering a click on that ad URL in his log files. The advertiser asked:

Why is the msn bot clicking our paid text ads?

There is still no clear answer from Microsoft or the webmaster as to why those URLs were found in the log file. I keep asking for an update to the thread, but no response yet.

Maybe it was a bug on the webmaster side or maybe it was a bug on the MSNBot side. I do not know, but I would love to hear some type of answer on this matter.

We all know, bots can drive a huge amount of clicks, really quickly. So it would trigger a read flag in the ad quality measurements.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally announced their search deal, after years of negotiation. In short, if the deal is approved by regulators, Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama) will be powered by Microsoft adCenter.

For SEMs, you need to know when this will happen. Best case scenario, the deal will be complete in early 2010, the longest it can take for full implementation is two years. The integration will begin in the United States with search and then with search ads. The integration will then expand to other countries and regions.

The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by Bing." Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval, and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the integration. So SEMs and SEOs have time to prepare. They won't have to worry about managing both adCenter campaigns and Panama campaigns, just adCenter (and of course, Google AdWords). I assume this means that the Yahoo Publisher Network is dead and really dead (not just in action, but legally dead).

I spent some of the morning posting the key financial points at Search Engine Land and now Danny and Greg are posting their notes on the conference call now.

I assume the forums will heat up throughout the days going forward. But again, this will take time, so no need to panic right now. Remember, Yahoo first started off as a directory, then they powered their search off of that directory, then worked out a deal with Google to power their search, then dropped Google for their own search engine and now is dropping their own search for Microsoft's Bing. Who knows, maybe in 5 years (even though this is a ten year deal), maybe Yahoo will go back to Google. :)

More news coverage at Techmeme and forum discussion at Sphinn, Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

I am so tired about writing about the Microsoft and Yahoo talks rumors, so I am sure you are tired reading about it. But over the course of the past week or two, the rumors that a deal is going to happen "soon" is pretty strong. Exactly when, is unknown, but the rumors seem really strong.

The question a WebmasterWorld thread asks is should SEOs start preparing? Even if we know a deal is going to take place, what should SEOs prepare for?

I remember in early 2004, Yahoo was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which an engine they bought earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo Search.

Back then, SEOs were preparing for a version of Inktomi, but it turned out to be it's own beast.

In my opinion, if Yahoo would do some deal with Microsoft, I really don't think we would see a Yahoo flavored Bing that soon. If any deal is announced, I suspect several months of discussions and announcements before anything changes with Yahoo Search. So I strongly doubt we need to prepare for a Yahoo flavored Bing today.

You should be thinking Bing anyway, cause that engine is getting a lot of buzz recently and market share is increasing (depending on who you ask).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Technology Review reports the Microsoft research team designed a game to help make Bing a better search engine. The game is named Page Hunt and it presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it's no.2, and so on.

Here is a video demo, without sound, of me playing the game:

It is interesting, because it may show you how good or bad the Bing results are, in clear site. A WebmasterWorld thread has some fun quotes about this game:

Wow, Bing is crazy bad. I got like 1 out of 20 and some were very obvious.

I don't want to come across as a bing cheerleader, but I must say, that's a pretty dang creative idea to get the kind of direct feedback from users that might make for a better product. Will be interested to see if they post a general summation when the test has run it's course, as to whether they feel it gave them enough useful data to push bing another step forward. The better bing gets, the more competition we'll see in a field that needs more competition -- we'll all come out ahead...

Creative idea indeed, nice to see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Not to be outdone by Google, Bing seems to also be updating. I spotted at least three different threads, in three different forums, discussing how these webmasters either had no rankings in Bing prior to the other day and now have excellent rankings or had great rankings and now have poor rankings. This is a clear sign of an update, when you see several different forums discussing this, with so few webmasters actually looking.

The forum threads are at WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum & Bing Community thread. Here are excerpts from some of those posts:

Something seems to have changed with the Bing results over the last couple of days here in the UK. I used to struggle to rank on MSN search and when Bing launched and since I have checked and we were still on page 2 or 3 for most terms that we are #1 on Google.

Today for all of my main target terms (except one) we have gone in at #1 on Bing. The results below us look very much like Google.co.uk.

I was no.1 for my main keyword, and had been there for quite some time. Though I went to show a client an example and searched for my term in bing and now i'm not in the top 200?

Was a bit embarrasing to say the least!

Before a week it was in first page while searched "Tour Operator of Bangladesh" or "Tour Operator in Bangladesh" in Bing. But now it disappears from first page even it is not in second page. Last week backlinks showed 400+ now it shows <350 links.

Have you noticed a major update in Microsoft's Bing search engine?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum & Bing Community.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster asking why is he getting traffic from http://www.bing.com/spresults.aspx?

Brett Young from Microsoft's Bing Team came in to explain that the traffic seen coming from http://www.bing.com/spresults.aspx is actually from the Internet Explorer (IE) version 6 search pane or search box.

Brett said:

It is used for the IE6 search pane. I'm thinking the traffic is legitimate.

So if you see this traffic, it may be coming from a really old and outdated browser.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster who had his meta language tag set to the UK and he paid for it.

Supposedly, Microsoft's Bing plays close attention to that meta tag and in the case of Joomla, the default might be set to GB.

Brett Young from the Bing webmaster support team suggested to the webmaster to change the meta tag to:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

Brett said specifically, with Joomla, "I suggest adding the following meta tag to your home page header and verify that there are no tags pointing to "en-gb"--especially if you are using the Joomla CMS."

It seems like this is a common issue webmasters run into when using Joomla. So I thought I point it out here. I believe Google pays less attention to the meta tag, so it might not be an issue with Google.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

A Bing thread has two complaints from webmasters on Microsoft's newish crawler, MSNBot 2. The bot, in some cases, might be adding a pound sign (#) to the end of the URLs.

Now, this might not be the fault of Microsoft, it might be an issue with links and/or the web site's being crawled. But there are now two people reporting it and MSNBot 2 is a beta bot that may have issues, as Microsoft did allude to.

On June 29th, Brett from the Microsoft team did say, "I'm getting our crawler team to look at this. I'll update you as soon as I've heard back." But since then, we have not heard back.

Of course, there are ways to force the bot to the correct URL. I.e. block the # signs in your robots.txt or 301 redirect those URLs to the main URL.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

Last night, Google (GOOG) announced earnings and they "met" expectations, because the revenues were up 3%. There is a lot of buzz about this on Techmeme, but to read more about the earnings and the conference call about the earnings, see Greg's notes at Search Engine Land, there are some really nice tidbits in there.

Shortly after, news is leaking out that Yahoo and Microsoft are back at the table and this time, they are really really close to finalizing a deal. Of course these rumors and discussions have been going on for a really long time and many of you are tired of hearing about it. I for one, would like not to mention it until it actually happens, which I hope is soon.

Meanwhile, the biggest buzz over the past 12 hours is that TechCrunch posted stolen internal memos about Twitter's business strategy, that involved their discussions with Google, Microsoft, future growth plans and so much more. Matt McGee posted at Search Engine Land how these correspondence impact the search industry, so you can read those details there. The situation is just a sad one, and I believe law suits will follow.

That is the past 12 hours in search business news, it has been pretty busy.

Forum discussion on the GOOG news at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a large thread at the Bing Community on the topic of how Bing treats domain names. There are some people that feel that Bing's algorithm weighs too heavily on words in a domain name.

Cleo started the thread, which now has about 30 replies, even from Brett Young of Microsoft. Cleo said:

If I have one criticism of the Bing, it is that it puts WAY too much emphasis currently on keyword domain names. Like for example, if you made bread and had a website named www.bread.com, it would rank really high with Bing.
However, the actually quality and content or even code of the website may be terrible. It may not even be related to bread, but the people at Bing put way too much emphasis on just the names alone...

In the past and present, it has been a major source of abuse/keyword stuffing.

Two things I find interesting in this thread.

(1) The topic of how valuable a domain name is in the eyes of Bing. Clearly this is up for debate and anything you see today, can change tomorrow.

(2) How a site was sent to the spam team for review after discussion in the thread. Yes, you may be able to expedite spam reviews if you complain about specific sites in the Bing community.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Let me start off by saying this is not brand new, but Microsoft is now making sure people know about the Bing Toolbox. The Bing Toolbox is basically a landing page that has links to the most important webmaster tools that Bing manages.

That includes features such as:

• Submit a site
• Add a Sitemap
• Get an API key
• Browse API tools
• Access webmaster tools
• See Bing community forum & blogs
• And more...

Here is a screen shot of how the page looks right now:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is almost nothing worse than a malware warning for a webmaster or SEO to see in the search results. You can have top rankings in a search engine, but if your listing is labeled to be harmful and the search engine warns users not to visit the site, it can be devastating.

That is why Google and the other search engines offer malware reviews, either in their webmaster tools section or via a form. Google is known to take action on malware reviews within hours, the other search engines typically take days. But according to one thread, Microsoft's Bing may take several weeks.

A Bing Community thread has one webmaster who claimed he submitted his site for a malware review to all the search engines. Google removed the malware label within the same day, the other search engines took days, but Bing took several weeks, according to this webmaster. The webmaster simply said, "but this whole process did take too long."

I am not sure if this is a common practice with Bing or not. Any webmasters experience this as well? Please let me know.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Did you know that both Yahoo and Bing cannot tell the time in Tehran, Iran? A Bing Community thread points out the issue with Bing. Let me share with you searches for [time tehran] from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and Wolfram - you will notice that both Bing and Yahoo are off.

Bing shows 3:55pm:

Yahoo also shows 3:55pm:

Google, Ask & Wolfram Alpha all show the correct time, as 4:55pm:

I am not sure why there is a difference between these search engines. Some cite that the difference comes from Iran Standard Time versus Iran Daylight Time, but Iran has one time right now.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

You know how to get listed in Google News but what about Bing News? A Bing Community thread has discussion around that topic.

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster Center said the way to be included in Bing News is a manual process. You simply need to email bns@microsoft.com and wait to hear back.

What if you don't hear back? Brett suggests emailing again:

There should be confirmation from the review team. If you did not get one, I suggest emailing them again.

Yahoo News and Google News are tremendous traffic drivers, but Bing is gaining market share, according to some. So it cannot hurt to be listed.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

There are several reports around the web about a new search bot by Microsoft that is causing major issues for web servers. The bot is named adidxbot and the useragent looks like this: adidxbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm).

This bot has been on the loose since the middle of May. There are threads at WebmasterWorld and Bing Community with complaints about this bot. The bot reportedly indexes and crawls incredibly quickly, with no remorse on the web server. This can cause servers to see spikes of CPU usage and slow down the normal visitors from using the site. In addition, the spider does not obey the crawl delay command.

A Bing representative said the fix was just released this morning and the bot should no longer cause issues for webmasters. Brent Young of the Bing team said:

I just received word that they fixed the bug that was causing this. If you are still experiencing issues, please email me at lswmc@microsoft.com

I hope so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Community.

It is amazing how many blogs are buzzing about Bing adding Twitter results for some "prominent and prolific Twitterers." It works by searching for name tweet/twitter or the @username.

So for example, @rustybrick returns my "latest" Tweet.

The thing is, I took this screen shot five minutes after making a new Tweet. Here is that new tweet:

So we know that Bing must pull from the public Twitter API, not in real time, but on set intervals. A lot of people are touting this Bing/Twitter search answer as "real time." If it was literally real time, the Bing search results that contain tweets would have the potential to fail too often. Twitter is known for their downtime and to pull Tweets in real time from the API can fail also. So clearly, Bing is storing these Tweets in a local data source and serving them up in close to real time, but not exactly real time.

FYI, it is now 10 minutes after tweeting and the tweet does not show up in Bing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago, we showed our readers many of the bing commercials and asked you guys if you liked them. To my surprise, about 60% of you said you do like them, while only about 25% of you said you don't like them. Here is the break down of the results:

Question: Do You Like The Bing Commercials?

:: Yes said 54 respondents or 59%
:: No said 24 respondents or 26%
:: Indifferent said 9 respondents or 10%
:: Other answer... said 4 respondents or 4%

Other answers include:

• I don't have any problems with google, so the commercials seem redundant to me.
• Annoying
• Who Cares
• Only the search overload ones

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Catalyst Group study showed that searchers mostly liked Bing's search interface and results over Google, but would not leave Google because they were familiar with it. TechCrunch covered this study first, where the key findings included:

• Most searchers liked Bing's design and organization layout over Google
• Users felt Bing and Google were equal in returning relevant results, despite the layouts
• Most searchers would continue to use Google, even though they liked Bing better

Here is the chart people are showing:

Here is the full PDF of the study:

Catalyst Group Bing V. Google Usability Study -

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There has been a lot of Bing buzz on how the 'new' search engine is competing in the search landscape. But is that traffic all legit?

Remember, since April 2007, Microsoft has been sending weird referrals to many webmasters. They were known as internal cloaking tests designed by Microsoft's search quality team. But even though they promised to cool it with those visible tests, it came back time and time again.

Today, we are seeing new reports from a respected webmaster at WebmasterWorld, who noticed a huge influx in referrers from Bing. The issue is, as the WebmasterWorld moderator said, the referrers are porn related and totally not relevant to his web site. This, to me, implies, Microsoft is starting their spam tests again and messing around with the analytics webmaster rely so heavily on.

The moderator said that he normally gets about a "few dozen visitors per day" from Bing, but now:

But suddenly, Bing traffic has shot up sharply. Yesterday Bing sent 2015 visits, today 1829, and the day is not over. The problem is that the traffic is coming from p--n searches which are absolutely not relevant.

The number of 404 errors is up sharply, as well. One or two dozen per day would be normal, but yesterday there were over 2600.

We have no word from Microsoft on this as of yet, but I am a bit suspicious of all these recent search share reports.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: In this case, it was not a Microsoft issue. The thread has been updated noting that the site in question was hacked and injected with spam. This is what caused those referrals.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around Microsoft's commercials for Bing. I saw a few on TV several days ago, and they are pretty unique. But some people love them and some people hate them.

Bing finally set up a YouTube channel with many of their commercials at youtube.com/user/bing so i'll post a few here and please let me know if you like them in our quick poll below.

Here is the poll, please take it:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Bing added instant translation as a smart answer or instant answer to their search. For example, if you search for how do you say search in spanish you get the answer "búsqueda."

Google also has some form of translation OneBox results, but they are not as discoverable as Bing. That means, you can't just type, how do you say something, or translate X for me.

Even more importantly, Webmasters approve of how this instant translation works in Bing. Not only is the translation pretty good, the way the translation shows up in the search results are "neat."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

When Bing launched a bit over a week ago, we asked our readers via an anonymous poll if they like the new Microsoft search engine.

To my surprise, 70% of the responses said they like the new search engine.

Keep in mind, the index is mostly the same, but the search interface is the major difference, from what I understand. Interface is huge and clearly plays a major roll in relevancy.

Here is the break down of the 120 responses, where I asked, "Do You Like Bing's Search Results?"

:: Yes said 83 respondents or 69%
:: No said 29 respondents or 24%
:: Other... said 8 respondents or 7%

Here are the other answers:

• they're okay i guess
• Does it matter? People won't switch.
• Relevancy of sites returned is still hinky. but there are interesting feautures
• Where's the Sarcastic 'yes' option?
• Generally good, local crap
• It's really the same, nothing new.
• No different than LiveSearch results
• It's OK but not enough to switch

Forum discussion continued at:

• Microsoft To Launch Decision Engine 'Bing' June 3, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft Unveils Bing - the new search engine, DigitalPoint Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Bing : Micrsoft's new search engine, Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Will Bing,com be your next Search Engine?, Search Engine Watch Forums
• Live Gone - Now Bing, DigitalPoint Forums
• Live switched to Bing, WebmasterWorld

This June 6th, Saturday, is known to many as D-Day. June 6, 1944 was the day the D-Day operation began and thousands of soldiers died. It was also the 25th anniversary of the popular computer game, Tetris.

Google decided to celebrate Tetris's 25th anniversary with a Google Doodle, while Bing honored D-Day with a special theme.

Google Tetris Doodle on June 6, 2009:

Bing's D-Day Theme on June 6, 2009:

There are many searchers very upset with Google over celebrating Tetris overing honoring the fallen soldiers. We know that Google often tries to stay away from posting logos for sad events. Google even commented why they don't do a Google Doodle for memorial day (although they did post a Google ribbon this year). Google said in 2008:

Thank you for your note. We understand your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we'd want to express reverence; however, as Google's special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design.

We wouldn't want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

Should Google have not posted anything? Should Google have posted a D-Day Doodle? Should Google just do whatever they want? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at several forums:

• How can Google recognize Tetris on 6 June instead of D-Day (6 June 1944)?, Google Webmaster Help
• New Google Logo : Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect, DigitalPoint Forums
• Google start page Tetris on June 6?, Google Web Search Help
• Tetris? New Google Logo, Google Webmaster Help
• WHAT ABOUT D-DAY !!!!!, Google Web Search Help

So, Microsoft made some serious press with Bing, their new search engine, going live. The search interface is very different from Live.com and some of the vertical search portals, like video, maps, images have new features, but a lot of the tools remain the same.

For example, people are first noticing that Bing has a Local Business Center. Honestly, the way to get there is to go to https://ssl.search.live.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx and it will redirect you to https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx. If you had a Live Search Maps listing, you have a Bing listing.

Same with Bing's webmaster tools, go to http://webmaster.live.com/ and you will be redirected to http://www.bing.com/webmaster. The features remain the same, for the most part, outside of a new logo at the top left.

Sorry for the little rant about Bing being so new and exciting. It is exciting and new, but much of the press around Bing is calling old features new, when they are not new (i.e. Live411 to Bing411).

There are several reports at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help with searchers who use Internet Explorer version 6 on their PC and are claiming that Bing has hijacked the search feature in the toolbar.

Several users are claiming that since Bing was launched, even though Google was their default search provider in IE, Bing has taken control. Even worse, when they try to change it back from Bing to Google, it does not work.

Here is one post:

Had Google set as my default browser. woke up this morning to discover that BING had hijacked this feature. cant change it via: search/customize on the IE tool bar. all I get is a windows live page saying Ooops.

There is no official explanation from either Microsoft or Google, as of yet. Matt Cutts of Google did tweet about the issue. A Microsoft individual did tweet back saying the "folks have escalated your concerns."

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help and Google Web Search Help.

Update: We have a statement from Microsoft on this issue:

We're aware of the issue with IE6 and Bing and are investigating a solution. This issue is not impacting IE7 or IE8 users. We respect user choice on search providers in IE and all browsers, and designed IE to enable that choice. We will provide an update soon on this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience it has caused. In the meantime, we encourage customers to upgrade to IE8 here. Alternatively, Firefox users can install the add-in for Bing here.

Update: Microsoft emailed me again at 2:45am on June 3, 2009 to inform me the issue is now resolved with IE6. The issue was server side, so the fix was able to be pushed out remotely to all infected browsers.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, which launched the other day, does not seem to support the NOODP tag.

The NOODP tag tells the search engine not to use the Open Directory Project's title or description for your search listing. Google, Yahoo and MSN Search supported the tag. The tag was introduced back in 2006 after webmasters became upset that the search engines were using some of those titles.

In any event, the WebmasterWorld thread claims Bing is now using titles and descriptions from DMOZ (ODP) even though the NOODP tag is on the page. I don't have any test cases I can remember off the top of my head to validate this, so I am leaving this open.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The wait is over, Microsoft's new search engine, Bing is now live. It was rumored to be going live on June 3rd, but it went live some time early this morning. Techmeme is buzzing on the launch and Microsoft seems to be getting some pretty good press about the early launch.

The demo last week wasn't as positive as what I see now from the community. I guess people like what they are seeing.

Try it yourself now at Bing.com. Some SEOs are joking that BING stands for, ""But It's Not Google." It is not Google, that is true. The forum discussion is pretty positive, so I thought I ask you in a simple poll, do you like it?

Forum discussion:

• Microsoft To Launch Decision Engine 'Bing' June 3, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft Unveils Bing - the new search engine, DigitalPoint Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Bing : Micrsoft's new search engine, Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results, Sphinn
• Will Bing,com be your next Search Engine?, Search Engine Watch Forums
• Live Gone - Now Bing, DigitalPoint Forums
• Live switched to Bing, WebmasterWorld

The exciting topic from last night was that Microsoft is demonstrating their search engine next week at the D: All Things Digital conference. It is expected that the search engine will go live at the SMX Advanced conference a week later.

Danny Sullivan has a nice write up on what we can expect from Microsoft. There are questions about when it is launching, what brand will it go under and how it will compete with Google. Microsoft is struggling in the area of both branding the engine and making it as good as Google. So we will see how the demo works out and if it can make a dent in Google.

Time will tell. I was wrong in 2004 when I said Microsoft will beat Google even if they aren't more relevant. I actually am happy that they did not and I am happy to admit I was wrong. I am now wiser to say, let's wait and see with what happens here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft is having a rough couple weeks. First they shut down their tests that is causing fake referral data from being spewed out and now I am hearing reports that their HTTP headers are malformed.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Microsoft is keep-alive and transfer-encoding the connection. Here is an export of the status:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
P3P: CP="NON UNI COM NAV STA LOC CURa DEVa PSAa PSDa OUR IND", policyref="http://privacy.msn.com/w3c/p3p.xml"
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 16:56:37 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive, Transfer-Encoding
Cache-Control: private

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The ongoing saga of Live Search's fake referral data to possibly conduct cloaking experiments has been shut down temporarily.

The official Microsoft representative has told us in a WebmasterWorld thread that it has been shut down. He said:

I just spoke with the team. They said they are working on a fix for this, but the feature causing the problem is turned off currently, so you shouldn't be seeing any fake referrals from us.

Exactly what type of "feature" is causing this to be a problem is not clear. In the past, we know Microsoft had a bot that tested for detecting cloaking. But this time, the Microsoft representative did not mention cloaking. Is this some new type of feature or just issues with the old cloaking detection algorithm?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Live Search Maps is still gaining ground and currently, the only businesses that can verify their listings are those in the US. For US businesses, you can go to Live Search Local Listing Center and update your listings. But if you are outside of the US, you are out of luck.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a UK business owner who was upset he was unable to verify his listing. MSNDude, an official Microsoft representative has finally come in to respond. His response:

Unfortunately, we currently do not support local listings outside of the US. However, I believe the local listings team is working to expand this in the near future.

You hear that? It might be here in the "near future." Who knows how long that really means, but "near future" to me, would mean within the year.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since August 2007 Microsoft has been sending out weird referrer data to people's log files. The spam like referrers were official cloaking tests from Microsoft and should have been resolved in 2007. But they came back in January 2008 and then again in July 2008 without explanation.

We are now seeing them again, starting last month. A WebmasterWorld thread said it is coming from search.live more than MSN bots.

Microsoft's Jason chimed in the other day suggesting Betsy Aoki at Microsoft via this form. But soon after, Brett Yount from Live Search's Webmaster Center came in as MSNDude and said:

I would like to apologize for the inconvenience this is causing. We are working to correct this issue ASAP.

Hopefully it will get resolved soon and forever.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As a way to promote Microsoft's search technology, in November 2006, Microsoft launched Ms. Dewey, a Flash based search interface which answered your queries in a witty and sarcastic manner. Sadly, as Kim reports, msdewey.com no longer is live, in fact, the domain name is set to expire in November of this year.

The irony of this is that when Ask dropped Jeeves, I joked that Dewey was the new Jeeves character in the search field. Then, in October 2008, we noticed that Jeeves became a porn star when he let his domain expire and an adult site took it over. Now, the comical part is that the woman who played the character of Ms. Dewey has history in the adult film business.

I find that pretty funny - not sure if you will.

In any event, Ms. Dewey, the beloved and witty search character Microsoft employed, is now no longer active. No word from Microsoft on this matter yet.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Bill at WebmasterWorld found a new MSN Japan search engine named Zenbu Kensaku at http://zenbu.jp.msn.com/.

I don't read or understand Japanese, so let me quote you his comments:

This new search engine beta actually will work with a lot of English keyword searches in addition to the Japanese. Enter a keyword and give it a try.

The tabs at the top offer a number of ways to break down the SERPs. The default is to show all of the different categories together on one page "zenbu". Then we have web, Q&A, images, movies, news, maps, shopping, and sponsors.

I've run through several searches, and it looks like a useful way to break down the SERPs. Could this be part of the MS Kumo beta?

Common to Asian based search engines, the interface is very graphical. I decided to try searching for the word privacy in Japanese and I took a screen capture of the very interesting search results layout. You can see a screen capture of it at my Flickr account.

This is clearly powered by Live Search, but the big question is, might this be a preview of Kumo in Japan? I doubt it is what we would see in the US when Kumo launches.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft Search, MSN Search, Live Search, Windows Live Search, and now Kumo? Yea, Microsoft is still finding themselves with a brand for search. Currently, Live.com is the search portal for Microsoft, but everyone knows they have issues branding that portal. Plus they need to differentiate. Until now, and even now, they are playing catch up with search technology, trying to get up to speed with even Yahoo. Google, well - they are pretty far ahead.

Microsoft's answer? Code name, Kumo. I am not going to show screen shots, that has been done all over the web already. I would suggest reading Danny Sullivan's break down of screens and features.

I want to share the reaction from the webmaster from WebmasterWorld. Here are select quotes from the thread:

Good news but you cannot "catch up". A new service won't create more searches so they'll have to cut into Yahoo and Google to borrow some of theirs.

You know, it's the Yin and Yang and Yahoo effect.

Microsoft entered and took over the browser war in about 5 years.

In search, they have not gained any ground in 5 years. Time to go back to making your OS better. Like maybe having an upgrade path from XP to your latest OS, considering XP still has a 70% market share... But hey, we are talking Microsoft here... They will do what they want regardless of common sense.

If they're smart and they can work out the licensing, the next version of Windows will ship with IE, FF, Chrome and Safari all set to go and all defaulting to their search engine.

Oh yeah, and they'll quit changing the name of their search engine every year.

Oh yeah, and they'll quit choosing stupid names for a search engine, like Live or Kumo.

Sounds like lipstick on a pig to me. Google's safe for another decade or two.

What I like about this new search they are testing is their focus on the usefulness of the search engine in terms of accomplishing tasks. Microsoft appears to be looking closer at user intent.

Some of this comments are classic! I was wrong, I thought by now Microsoft would be totally competing with Google. I admit it, I was wrong.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

incrediBILL, moderator at WebmasterWorld, noticed that one of Live Search's bots was crawling through his JavaScript. The bot is named MSNBOT-MEDIA and he noticed that it was accessing JavaScript files and AJAX functions.

He noticed that the bot was triggering actions on a href="#" OnClick="OpenFeedback(1010101234) and he noticed the bot accessing pages that were only accessible through JavaScript or AJAX.

This makes logical sense, as people in the thread note. Much of media content now is accessible only through forms of JavaScript and enabling a bot to access some of that content is important to building a quality media search engine.

Last year, Google officially started crawling JavaScript forms to get to the data that was behind them. More and more spiders are going to start doing this as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan writes about the problems about Microsoft search at Search Engine Land, and he explains what they need to do in order to get it together.

Some reasons are that Microsoft's key executives don't care about search. For example, in Danny's experience doing conferences, Microsoft has yet to send a key player such as Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer run the keynote conversation. They simply don't think it's worth it. (On the other hand, other conferences are fair game for these guys.)

Another reason for Microsoft's failure is that they seem to emphasize that they care about search, but they certainly aren't practicing what they appear to preach. Danny points out the following taglines: Google's tagline is "Search, Ads & Apps" and Microsoft's is "Software + Services." Where's search, Microsoft?

A third reason Danny cites is that Microsoft still doesn't get search. At least not the way we see it. He says that Microsoft perceives search as software, and that's not it. Search updates are rolled out on Google on no schedule, but with Microsoft's (cough) bureaucracy, it seems that changes must be done on some sort of schedule.

Danny goes into a lot more detail, explaining that there are executive inconsistencies, lousy advertising, requiring integration of services, and lame distribution deals that are not swaying people away from Google.

All in all, Microsoft in the search market is destined to go down. Or maybe the key players in Microsoft should take a good read at Danny's honest and forthright opinion so that they can make some real changes that can actually improve the perception of Microsoft in the eyes of searchers.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I am seeing reports at WebmasterWorld of a possible Microsoft update to Live Search.

Senior member, bwnbwn, said it looks like Microsoft is jumping back and forth between two indexes. He said:

It looks to me that there are 2 data centers the serps and they are rotating in and out. One data center is presenting much better serps the other may be a way microsoft is working on the bot and is throwing the spammy one.

Others are not happy with the update, complaining that there is too much search spam at the top.

The last possibly update was in early October. Some suspect this update might have something to do with the new MSNBot Microsoft just started testing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In a report by ZDNet, Microsoft and Dell have arrived at an agreement that new Dell computers will be shipped with the Live search bar preinstalled -- instead of Google's.

This is really big news for Microsoft (and as one suggests, even for Google shareholders). Having a preinstalled brand is a big deal, and with Microsoft being the preinstalled brand, this is huge for them.

It's possible, though, that this implementation (which hasn't been confirmed by Microsoft OR Dell), may be a problem in Europe.

The (potential) problem for DELL and Microsoft is that in the EU at least it's illegal to use a (de-facto) monopoly to gain market advantage in other areas.

But while Microsoft isn't a monopoly in terms of search, perhaps that won't necessarily be an issue. Of course, we'll see how this plays out when the companies confirm the partnership.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft has added malware reporting to Live Search Webmaster Tools. This comes after a significant update just months ago from Microsoft.

Now you can easily see if your pages or pages you are linking to contain malware or not. If they do, you can fix your content or not link to a page that contains malware. The Live Search Webmaster Blog has screen captures of what the reports look like when a page is infected by malware. Luckily, when I looked at the reports from this site on Live Search Webmaster Tools, I did not find any examples of malware issues either on the site or to sites I link to.

In addition to the malware reporting, Microsoft made it simpler to authenticate your site with Webmaster Tools.

As a matter of history, we posted first screen captures of Live Search Webmaster Tools back in November 2007. Soon after, Microsoft opened a public beta for others to give it a try. Then in July of this year, I doubted Microsoft's efforts with their webmaster tools. I was proven wrong a month later with improvements made to the tool.

We have discussion at WebmasterWorld around the link reports, where webmasters seem to be confused on the accuracy and how those green dots are reported. We do not have much discussion around the new feature of malware reporting.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Many SEOs use the site command to see how healthy their site is in a particular search engine. So you plug in site:www.mydomain.com in a search engine and the search engine will return the number of pages they have indexed for that domain. If you know you have a hundred pages and the search engine indexed 90% of those pages, then you are pretty well off.

But the problem is, the site command is not often all that reliable. We had recent reports that Google is dropping pages and we had recent reports that Microsoft Live Search is dropping pages as well. Most SEOs determine a drop in pages indexed by the number of results returned by the engine for a site command.

But is this a valid way of really determining how many pages a search engine indexed of your site? From what I am hearing from search engine representatives at both Google and Microsoft, the answer is no. A webmaster should not depend on the number returned by a site command as a reliable indicator of the number of pages a search engine has indexed of their site.

Googler, JohnMu, wrote in a recent Google Groups thread three reasons why SEOs and Webmasters should not depend on this number:

• The previous approximation was incorrect, the current one is closer to the actual number of URLs that we have indexed or would show to users
• The previous approximation was close and the current one is worse than before (this can happen)
• A change in our algorithms (we make a lot of changes that will impact crawling, indexing and ranking -- for some sites perhaps more than for others)

At the same time, Microsoft's Jeremiah Andrick told me that it "is problematic to use the "site:" operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query."

That being said, how can you get an accurate number of pages indexed by a search engine for your site?

I know Google's Webmaster Tools has in their Sitemaps section a place to show you the number of pages submitted in your Sitemap compared to how many URLs actually indexed. So, this might be a better indicator, but I am nervous about this number, because way too often I hear of reporting glitches in Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to track each and every keyword phrase your pages rank for. Then see by keyword, not by site command, if those pages rank. This can be time consuming, but there are ways to automate this.

Overall, using the site command might not be the best way to determine how healthy your site is in a particular search engine. I know many SEOs use this as a factor, but maybe it is time we think again about this?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Let me start off by saying Microsoft did not pay me to write this post. I am only writing it because I think it will save you all money for the holiday season. I personally bought something on this yesterday. Now, let me get to how you can save 25% on your holiday gifts, it is really easy and legit.

As many of you know, Microsoft is desperate to gain market share for Live.com. How desperate? Extremely. Microsoft is so desperate that they are willing to pay for 25% of whatever you buy through Live Search, if you do it through their cashback program. Microsoft Cashback which launched in May of this year is still offering huge discounts. Let me take you through how you can buy almost anything and get 25% off.

Yesterday, I purchased a Delta faucet, specifically, Victorian Centerset Bath Faucet, for one of my bathrooms. My wife has been eyeing it for a while and I felt, I would be a good husband and buy it for her. The sticker price is $282.65 but after you go to normal stores, it runs just about $200. I figured, why not try using Microsoft's Cashback to get an extra 25% off of the $200.

Step 1: Search for wii on Live.com
Step 2: Find an eBay ad (or any ad) that has a cashback logo and click on it:

Step 3: Make sure towards the top of the eBay page it has the cashback logo. That logo looks like this:

Step 4: Now search for what you are looking for, in my case, 2555RB-216RB, which is the model number of the faucet I want to get my wife. If you find it, then your in luck, now its time for...

Step 5: Make sure you have a PayPal account, most of you do already, but if you don't, you need one. You can do this in a new window.

Step 6: Make sure you have a Cashback account, takes not too long to sign up for one. You can do this in a new window.

Step 7: Buy it now with your PayPal account. Make sure you see that cashback logo throughout the process.

Step 8: The confirmation receipt page, should have a blue "Get cashback" button. Make sure to click on it.

Step 9: A new window should open up and it might ask you to login to your cashback. Do that and you should be set. Don't worry if you don't see the cashback refund immediately. It should show up in a day or two. I received an email with my reward 10 minutes after.

The email looked like this:

Hello, Barry!

Thanks for searching, shopping and saving with Microsoft Live Search cashback - The Search That Pays You Back!

From your recent purchases, you have earned cashback savings!

To view the details for this purchase or your other Live Search cashback transactions, sign into your Live Search cashback account. The transaction will be listed as pending for 60 day(s). Your cashback savings will be paid to the PayPal account that you used to make the purchase after a 60 day(s) pending period.

You received $48.00 from your eBay purchase on 11/25/2008:



For more information about Live Search cashback, see our FAQ page or Contact Us.

Thanks,
The Live Search cashback team

Soon later, you should see it show up in your CashBack account. I know several people who use this often and it is really a great way to save some of your hard earned money in these tough times.

Now, I know people who take advantage of this platform. I won't discuss those details, but most of you can figure out how to make some money off this Cashback system. If not, maybe I'll tell you via Twitter only, not via email, but you need to follow me on Twitter and @rustybrick me and Ill reply that way, if I see it.

Hope this helps a few people and if it helps Microsoft, great!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Rumor has it -- as reported on Search Engine Land and Liveside -- that Microsoft is rebranding its search under the name kumo.com. According to the reports, kumo.com is owned by Microsoft and points to search.live.com nameservers. It also provides Microsoft employees with an internal site.

Whether or not it's true is only speculation at this point. However, sentiment is pretty heavily expressed against Microsoft taking this approach.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It's been confirmed by Microsoft: MSN Groups is closing on February 21, 2009. Microsoft, in turn, will be moving over to Multiply for all of its community needs. As for why Microsoft has opted to close its own service, their reasoning is simple: they want to provide the best technology and offerings. Microsoft believes that by using Multiply this will happen.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

I spotted two thread this month discussing how little Microsoft is indexing their sites but how often Microsoft's bot, MSNbot, is crawling their sites.

A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has details of the newish behavior from MSNbot. BillyS at WebmasterWorld explains:

I was just looking through my logs and noticed that msnbot was crawling our site pretty hard, grabbing about 10% of the site in the last half hour or so.

I just checked the site: command on Live and we've only got about 100 pages in their index now - which is fewer than the number of pages mentioned above.

Billy, as others, wonder if they should just block MSNBot all together, since they feel the traffic they received from Live Search is not worth the stress the bot puts on the server when they crawl.

Let's do some comparisons of Google versus Live Search in site command counts:

• site:www.seroundtable.com - Google 12,800 vs. Live Search 268
• site:www.google.com - Google 1,680,000 vs. Live Search 330
• site:www.flickr.com - Google 71,000,000 vs. Live Search 268
• site:www.webmasterworld.com - Google 446,000 vs. Live Search 357

So either I am doing something wrong or Live Search's site command is wrong, or Live Search forgot how to index pages?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft sent me a response to this post, which I felt would be great to add.

For webmasters, It is problematic to use the “site:” operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query.

You posed the question about whether users should block MSNbot because traffic from the bot is not worth the stress on your servers. Obviously, we would prefer that customers not block MSNbot, rather customers who are concerned with stress from Live Search crawls should add the crawl-delay parameter to their robots.txt file. This can help reduce the load on your servers and still be a part of the Live Search results. Webmasters can refer to the MSNBot support page for more information on crawl-delay.

On the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Blog (and even in a second post), Senior Product Manager Skip Chilcott writes that link exchanges are a "popular way to generate more links." Blogger Saad Kamal has a problem with this. Citing several guidelines from Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft itself, it's apparent that link exchanges to artificially inflate rankings is frowned upon.

But Saad Kamal goes further to say it's black hat SEO. Really? The idea that it's "black hat" might be a stretch; link exchanges themselves are sketchy. Most would consider black hat SEO to be a lot worse than a simple link exchange that thousands of webmasters do daily. I'm sure they'd argue that black hat SEO is a practice that only a fraction of webmasters even knows about and thus employs.

But while being equated with black hat endorsements, Danny Sullivan considers this "embarrassing" because the Microsoft Office Live team doesn't seem to be on the same page as the Microsoft Search team. I guess it's hard when Microsoft's initial project and core goal isn't search whereas a company like Google or Yahoo emerged out of their search services. In the latter case, the idea of search appears to preside over the entire company.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Brett Tabke with Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, MSN Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft.

Brett welcomes everyone and does some quick house keeping.

Satya Nadella is now up, it seems like he will be speaking, no back and forth with Brett.

(1) Evolution of Search
(2) Services that Microsoft is providing for publishers

He starts with the web ecosystem, you have publishers and you have advertisers and then you have services; the ad platforms, audience platforms and infrastructure platforms.

Evolution of Search, he said how we had directories, to machine learn ranking algorithms. We had CPM/Paid inclusion, larger reach, and reactive customers, Consumers now query as oppose to browse.

The evolution is driven by the feedback loop of data. One of those data points is what are users doing on search engines. There are two things that are indicative of the next big shift in search. Close to 50% of time spent on search engines, about 50% is spent about 30 minutes on them. About 50% of queriers are returning.

50% of the time spent on a search engine, has behavior to look, find and then buying. Fundamental thing, is no one does queries in isolation, they do it in search for task completion.

Search engines have to get much better at understanding the queries, understanding the content and understanding the actions, in order to take search to the next level. Going forward then get better at getting to the action of search, making sure to take that click and finishing the task and then providing more visibility in that process to the advertiser. Better to bring a place, person or thing and bring them together to provide a better search experience.

That is the evolution of search, there is a lot of innovation to be done, a lot of test, etc.

Live Search is focused on (1) delivering the best search results, (2) Simplify the tasks and (3) innovate in the business model. Microsoft is "on pace" with the race on "core relevance." Microsoft is committed on this going forward. Core relevance improvements is to come up with new relevancy metrics and concepts. Powerset is an example of this. They also look at image search and video search and they have some of the industry leading in that. Microsoft wants to create more richer experiences that understand more user tasks in the commercial domain (product, travel, health, etc.) On the business model, live search cash back is a method for this. The next step is to introduce more efficiency in the CPC/CPM model.

Alexandra Mickel from the Live Search team takes the stage to show a demo. She shows off the home page and shows off the "hot spots." She then searches for "bellagio," which shows auto complete and then goes to images - they have integrated Virtual Earth. Plus they have "infinite scroll," so users don't have to hit next, you just scroll and it shows you more images and more.

She then showed a search result for flights from seattle to las vegas which shows details of Farecast, here are those details (I love Farecast).

She then shows a search for canon digital camera and how it shows product search results, and deeper links into Canon's web site. The product results have number of filters, rating, reviews, pricing comparison and Cash Back. Notice of the ad from eBay on the right has a Live Search cashback link (you can save a ton of money this way guys).

She then shows the updated Hotmail screen. Using their Live Search API, they integrated features on the right to insert details from Live Search.

Video Browse just started at Live Search Video. Hover over the images for a play back.

Satya Nadella is now back up.

150-200 relevancy improvements are made every quarter. They measure this stuff every month. If you have not used Live Search in a long time, give it a try and let him know your thoughts.

He now brings up Cash Back. A bigger criticism was that they didn't tie in the research mode into the buy mode with cash back. So they are bridging the two together more and more every day. They measured progress on three levels, consumer choice, advertiser ROI and query growth.

Consumer Choice: 30% increase in number of product offerings, 20 of top 50 US retailers and lot of merchants.

Advertiser ROI: eBay is shifting their spend to Microsoft. 50% better ROI because of the cash back model. Lots of these retailers are seeing great conversions. So give it a try.

Query Growth: User engagement is up in being more loyal and more click yields. They got a good unique growth. This is all substantiated by the comScore study coming out today.

Project Silk Road - Services for Developers and Publishers:

Lots of the technology they built up can be useful to developers and publishers. Project Silk Road is a broad project, all about opening up their data and technology more transparent. We care about: Increasing engagement, to generate traffic and drive insight (tools and analytics). It is all about boosting agility and control with turnkey solutions for storage, site management, merchandising and advertising.

They have Virtual Earth API, Webmaster Center, Video Syndication, Live Search API, adCenter for pubs, Custom Web Error Toolkit, Instant Answers, FAST ESP, adCenter API, Excel add in and so on. These are all bring brought together.

Live Search API 2.0, unlimited calls, easy integration, monetization methods and flexible:
Available today at search.live.com/developers/

Alexandra Mickel is back on stage to demo:

Fabrikam.com web site was put together in a single day from the Live Search API. It is a blog, with contextual ads, the ad in the top right is an interactive ad - this is a new concept to engage in the ads, the plan a trip link and it has many of Microsoft's APIs plugged in there. Maps, Images, silver light, encartra, and so on. She then goes to webmaster tools, she shows the crawl issues page, she then shows off the Excel add in tool for adCenter (pretty powerful add in for excel, in terms of keyword research, quickly).

Satya Nadella is now back up.

He then reinforces what she said. How important it is that they are opening up their data.

Overall they are excited about the progress they have made.

Danny has his write up on this at SELand with Silk Road and Cash Back.

Microsoft has been really focusing on building out support and tools for webmasters for their Live Search product. It is beginning to show. A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports one webmaster who has been trying to gain assistance for two years, was now able to get clear and useful feedback from Microsoft.

Why all of a sudden? Well, because of Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Tools and their now active Live Search Webmaster Forums. This particular webmaster was able to figure out the issue through the use of both the tools and forums.

So, if your having issues with your website in Live Search, make sure to register with webmaster.live.com and check out the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Live Search blog announces a partnership between Facebook and Microsoft for search and ads. You can now either "Search Facebook" or "Search the Web" using Live.com. Additionally, adCenter ads will be delivered alongside those search results.

So far, it's good to integrate search on Facebook with search on Live.com to prevent opening a second tab/browser to perform searches. However, as one forum member points out, this looks like an attempt for Microsoft do dominate the search realm.

Other implications of this search partnership will relate to the personal information Facebook has about you and how Microsoft should probably leverage that with this search integration. I'd admit -- if I'm searching on the Web using Facebook, I'd definitely want more personalized results than generic SERPs for any random query.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and High Rankings Forums.

We have two WebmasterWorld threads and a DigitalPoint Forums thread discussing a brief update and bug with Microsoft's Live Search.

We know the last Microsoft Live Search update was about 15 days ago. So it does seem a bit early for another update. We also know that Yahoo updated recently and Google had a PageRank update on the same day. So maybe Live Search felt left out? Just kidding.

The DigitalPoint Forums thread reported an issue with Live Search or MSN Search missing "next" buttons in the search results. While the two WebmasterWorld threads reported the results flipping from one set to a new set of results. Which set of results were positive? It depends who you ask.

The update and bug seem to have been reversed quickly. There was very little discussion around the update. But if I had to guess, if the same thing happened over at Google.com, well - I would guess there would be 20 threads at DigitalPoint Forums and a 10 page WebmasterWorld thread on the topic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

First, we had Microsoft Cash Back where Microsoft paid you to search the web with live.com. Now, we have Search Perks where Microsoft pays you to search the web with live.com ... well, almost.

The difference between Search Perks and Cash Back are minimal, but the idea behind the new creation is that you get points for every search. Those accumulate and then you can win prizes.

You're limited to IE6 or higher to participate, so Firefox users are not eligible. That's because SearchPerks has a built in toolbar.

It's questionable, though, if this is a good business plan for Microsoft. To me, it sounds like something that can be easily exploited. One forum member says the following to echo that sentiment:

If people are doing pointless searches and meanwhile clicking on ads to max out their "tickets", I can't see it being a good deal for anyone in the long run.

Many people agree and think that Microsoft should stop while they're ahead. But until then, happy searching!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

We've briefly seen search tool Powerset in action at SES just a month ago. They were acquired by Microsoft around that time and are already being integrated into search results. The Powerset blog explains some of the feature offerings: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using the Factz engine.

The blog also shows a screenshot of a relevant search. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce it just yet.

From what I see so far, these new features look quite promising.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting early signs of a major Microsoft Live Search update. The rankings, indexing and algorithm seems to have updated.

First reports came in from senior member, textex, at 9:30am (EST) yesterday. Since then, other members began to confirm the update. Old time member, Marcia, said:

A ten place drop from first to second page for the first site I checked isn't looking too appealing right now.

It looks like sites with a LOT of backlinks have risen to the top, I'm seeing some that have been ranking at Google for similar search terms, and have checked their link profiles in the past.

It'll take more looking, but I'd say it's definitely an update.

I checked my analytics and I see a major change for many keywords overnight from the Live Search referrals data. So I also can confirm seeing changes with Live Search.

The last major Live Search update we reported on was in July 2008.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft has spent a considerable amount of time and resources building out enhanced features to the Live Search Webmaster Tools. They announced releasing the new features this week, but it has gone, pretty much, unnoticed in the SEO and webmaster community forums.

I won't go through all the features of the tool, Vanessa Fox has done that at Search Engine Land, but I will discuss the lack of discussion around this launch.

There has been sufficient buzz about this tool in the past. We heard promises that it was coming in August 2007. Then in September 2007, Live Search began accepting beta testers to the program. In November 2007, Microsoft announced that it would be launched shortly. A few days later, I showed off screen captures of the tool and interface, and was a bit unimpressed, to say the least. Then Microsoft launched a beta version. I then discussed the Live Search rank bars found in their Webmaster Tools.

In any event, now the tool is out of beta, they added a bunch of features and no one cares. All we have is a single post at WebmasterWorld two days later, saying, that Microsoft announced it. But that is it. No feedback, no complaints, no suggestions, nothing. Someone did Sphinn the Search Engine Land post, but it has zero comments and only five sphinns. Hopefully people will have time to review it over the weekend and complain about it next week. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Sphinn.

In case you didn't know, Microsoft Live Search has been redesigned:

WebmasterWorld members are appreciative of the new change. It's different and unique.

But wait ... there's more. If you hover your mouse around certain areas, you can see where Microsoft is headed:

Their goal: to emphasize other features of search. Right now, there's an emphasis on Botswana, but forum members suppose that Microsoft will switch up the images a bit and offer different searches in the future, which one calls an "interesting strategy." (Agreed.) At the same time, this may have people wanting to "capitalize on those keywords" to get maximum search traffic. That, too, would be an interesting strategy.

Additional discussion can be read at Techmeme and forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

CNet reports that Microsoft has announced BrowseRank, which they feel may help boost the search's popularity. CNet explains the difference between BrowseRank (BR?) and PageRank:

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.

Basically, it comes down to user behavior. The more clicks and actions they can record, the more likely the page is favored (rather than emphasizing links). Since millions of people are using the Live.com search engine, the researchers claim that this evolution just makes sense.

Forum members are afraid that they've been targeted for the purposes of this study without realizing it (even though it is in the Terms of Service). Well, I guess that it's important to read these things.

Still, despite this, the same member who thought he was being spied on thinks that "[t]he BrowseRank algorithm is a thing of beauty, and their methods are brilliant." This is agreed by other forum members who feel that human behavior is the best way for search engines to go. (I'd argue that this is what humans do when they purposely link to certain pages versus others, but moving on...)

Is Microsoft offering brand new technology? One forum member says that FAROO, a P2P search engine, has the same kind of technology. Perhaps it is the mindset behind Microsoft, but it's not revolutionary, he argues. Still, making it more mainstream is a step in the direction that many webmasters are hoping for, provided that it doesn't get gamed.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Sphinn.

Big technology blogger Kara Swisher shares an internal memo of a Microsoft reorganization. Its Platforms and Service division will be split into 2 groups: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, of which members will report directly to Steve Ballmer. Microsoft's press release elaborates more on the company reorganization and explains that a number of former Microsoft executives will be moving to other opportunities outside the company while others are seeing promotions within the company. One of the people moving on is Kevin Johnson, who we covered in a keynote conversation only last month.

What does this mean for search? Nobody is sure yet. We'll just have to wait, hold on, and be hopeful.

Techmeme has a lot of blog discussion, and forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Six months ago, we reported that Microsoft Live Search was sending spammy types of referrals. Rogerd reports on WebmasterWorld that he's not seeing the same types of referrals we reported back in January, but he's finding some even stranger ones. For example, he saw a search for "computers" and this is a term he doesn't even rank for.

Other forum members report similar suspicious activity. As robzilla says, all hits have a referring URL that includes the variable "form=QBHP". After analyzing his logs, he says that the user agent is consistent across the board: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)".

Is this another spam or quality check? We've yet to find out.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if Microsoft is not serious about webmasters. Why? Well, if you use Live Webmaster Tools and you click on "Add Site," you will see funny messages.

For example, when they ask for your email address Microsoft says:

We don't send chain letters, lame jokes, or other unrelated stuff.

And then the sign me up for emails message reads, "Sign me up for the way cool and at most monthly newsletter for webmasters."

Here is a screen capture:

Personally, I think it shows humor and makes it feel more inviting. I agree with WebmasterWorld admin, Rogerd, who said:

They're just trying to soften up the old Evil Empire image with a little humor... It's a new fun, playful Microsoft. Think of Steve Ballmer as your best bud... :)

But I guess not everyone will feel that way.

For a look at what Live Search Webmaster Tools has to offer, see our first screen shots.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Techmeme has the big buzz about Google's second quarter earnings. Google claimed this was a strong quarter with 35% in profits ($3.92 per share), but their earnings still didn't meet analysts' expectations.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's earnings also rose. The company's fiscal fourth quarter ended on June 30th, with an approximate profit of $0.46 a share. While this is better than their earnings the previous year ($0.31/share), analysts were hoping for just a bit more ($0.47/share). Much of its failure, according to the report, is that Microsoft still has a weak online presence. Its profits are related to their operating systems and applications.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Google) and WebmasterWorld (Microsoft).

After several months of indecision regarding the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Techmeme shares multiple reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are no longer going to consider any sort of partnership (including one from the Yahoo press room.. The reasoning behind this is likely because of billionaire Carl Icahn's possible involvement; it would be too complicated to have a partnership that included the billionaire.

Still, forum members wonder why this even happened. Why does Microsoft want Yahoo so badly? According to forum members, it's because Microsoft hasn't had the history of building such great products internally, so they buy products that are built by another team and then they rebrand them. (This is similar to big brands' approach towards other products, though, considering that Google is the company that bought YouTube.)

One WebmasterWorld member says that this is more of a political battle than anything else:

Yahoo's refusal to accept a deal with Microsoft is much more to do with [their] directors history and sentiment and directly acts against the interests of [their] shareholders.

That could be true. A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Jerry Yang isn't very happy.

Meanwhile, one wonders if there's going to be another Yahoo/Microsoft thread in the upcoming months. It seems to be like "one big mess," but it's also a never-ending one at that.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums (#2).

A WebmasterWorld thread has new chatter about a possible Microsoft Live Search update that is taking place. The reports are very new, but also extremely significant.

Here are some quotes from some webmasters noticing the changes at Microsoft:

Has anyone noticed a large SERPs change in MSN today? For one of my main keywords I went from #1 to #41, except now it's a completely different page ranking for that term. As well most of the other competitors that were on the front page completely disappeared as well.

YES! And we went from number 60 to number 2! I'm lovin' it! Let's hope it stays like this because these are finally decent results! :)

The last time we reported on a Live Search update was back in April 2008, which we believed to be a rollback of the Live Search March update.

This update has major changes as well. Most are happy, at the moment, but it does not mean that the results are more relevant. We will keep watching and let you know about any significant changes.

Yesterday, we reported about a recent Yahoo Search update and the Google July fluctuations continue onwards.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Recent news in Yahoo has a number of innovators -- primarily young, talented, and influential Yahoo employees (in addition to some bigger execs) -- leaving the company. Among those have been Joshua Schachter of delicious, the Flickr founders, and big blogger Jeremy Zawodny. With the blogosphere abuzz of these recent developments, Yahoo must have decided it had to act. CNET reports that Yahoo upper management has been restructured to improve operations within the company.

Will this be the final reorganization? Probably not, as forum members suggest. With Yahoo and Microsoft not teaming up in the near future, CNN Money writes that Google, who may step in, is feeling the heat from Microsoft on claims of antitrust (which I find rather ironic, but moving on.). At the end, though, these two components together may improve all things for Yahoo. Yahoo has told its shareholders that a partnership with Google is better (and well, they may be right considering Google's search share). The reorganization may also help boost Yahoo's image in the eyes of shareholders.

Not everyone agrees with this sentiment, as there is still a concern about Google's control of 90% of the market. Many would rather see a Yahoo-Microsoft partnership than a Yahoo-Google partnership. But that's not happening right now. And forum members say that Microsoft should focus on creating sites with better user experience than to whine about antitrust.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (Yahoo reorganization), WebmasterWorld (Microsoft vs. Google), and WebmasterWorld (Yahoo's message to stockholders).

Last night at 6:30pm (EST), Yahoo announced a search ad deal with Google and discontinued talks with Microsoft. As you would imagine, this made major news - so read all the news stories, go to Techmeme, they organized most of the major stories for this announcement, as they always do.

The angle I am going to take with this article is to find out if this is good for you - the advertiser and the publisher. Let me explain that I listened to Jerry Yang and Susan Decker of Yahoo on the 6:30 conference call last night. In that call, I learned that Yahoo will pick and choose which keywords and industries queries they will show Google search ads over their own Yahoo search ads. They continue to call the Google ads, Google AdSense for Search - but in my mind, isn't Yahoo just a distribution partner of Google AdWords? Anyway, that is not as important - I assume they will show up in your AdWords reports as a normal syndication partner would.

Yahoo first announced that they would be testing Google ads back on April 10th. The day after, we saw first signs of Google ads on Yahoo Search results. The ads continued for well over a week, which was a surprise to many. Some advertisers loved having only to manage one campaign, a Google campaign, to also show their ads on Yahoo. But when I polled advertisers and publishers if they wanted to see Google power Yahoo ads in the future, advertisers will split down the middle.

The pie chart above and the detailed chart below are the results of our poll:

Of course, we only polled a limited set of users - mostly advertisers and/or publishers.

I would suggest, if you haven't yet, go answer the poll so I can get more responses and publish the results again.

Clearly, the deal would make it easier for advertisers in that they only have to manage one campaign. Of course, Yahoo said their ads will still be live - so it doesn't fully take the responsibility off the advertiser to manage their Yahoo campaigns. Most advertisers prefer the Google ad management interface over Yahoos'. But having one major player in the space is also scary to manage advertisers and publishers - yes competition is a good thing.

Note: I should have added that the Google ads won't be live on Yahoo for about 3.5 months, while Yaho