Microsoft MSN Search Archives

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 Yahoo awaits approval from the Senate.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

I have been tracking a very sensitive thread at High Rankings Forum for the past several days. The original thread creator is fairly cryptic in his details, due to privacy reasons, but I think I have a grasp of what is going on. Again, I might be wrong, but I think I might be right. Here it goes...

It appears that Siemens, the huge technology engineering company based in Europe is teaming up with Microsoft to sell search ads to their client base. The thing is, Siemens knows nothing about SEM, so they are looking for willing SEM consultants to aid them through the process.

What makes this even more interesting is that it seems like Siemens will only allow these third-party SEM companies to sell Microsoft Live Search ads to their clients. They won't allow them to sell Google ads or other search ads, outside of Live Search, to their client base.

What is this an issue? Well, Google holds the majority share of search traffic and by telling Siemens's clients that all they need to do is be on Live Search, might be considered immoral. On the other hand, if Microsoft sold direct, it would be a no brainer, but by masking themselves through Siemens and then a third-party SEM agency, it seems a bit unethical (for lack of a better word).

Again, I am not sure if this company is Siemens, but it makes logical sense based on the details in the thread.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Search with Microsoft Live, get cash back. That's the new mantra behind Microsoft's Live Search Cash Back program, which has its own dedicated homepage and works like this: you search for a product using Live, buy the product through the search engine, and then save. The site explains "Every time you make a qualifying purchase, we'll send you an email to confirm your Live Search cashback savings. When your cashback account reaches a balance of at least $5, you can claim your cold, hard cash."

Here's a screenshot of the interface:

It's an interesting system, though it does show the great lengths Microsoft is taking to get a share of the search pie. Will it work? I think it could, as long as people are using the search engine regularly for this purpose and if they're finding what they're searching for.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums and additional blogosphere discussion is at Techmeme.

Yesterday's news was all about Microsoft's new deal with Yahoo, which won't require an acquisition, which was dropped earlier this month, according to CNN, CNET, and other sources. Instead, the goal will be to keep the value of Yahoo high and make the shareholders happy. A number of people, including Loren Baker, assume that Microsoft may end up going for Yahoo's search technology. We'll see how this plays out.

There's mixed reviews for this new partnership (which forum members are hoping for rather than an acquisition). One goal is to take down the "Google monopoly" as one forum member puts it. But others believe that it may end up negatively impacting Microsoft since any investment would be a waste of money. Of course, others disagree with that entirely since Yahoo is one of the most popular sites on the Internet today.

What will we expect to see in 20 years if this goes through? (Heck, 20 years is a really long time. Look what has happened in 15 years!)

I guess it's hard to tell whether this is going to be a good investment or not, as there's a variety of opinions on the subject matter. Still, if it's a bad investment, it may be a risk people are willing to take, and if it's a good one, it may be "the deal of a lifetime" as one forum member suggests. Time will only tell.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Over the weekend, Microsoft finally backed off Yahoo and has decided to pull their offer to buy Yahoo and also decided they would not pursue a hostile takeover of the company. That sums it up basically. Now, if you want to read more, let me send you to Search Engine Land where we covered the news extensively.

• Microsoft Yanks Its Offer For Yahoo
• Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake?
• Yahoo Next Steps: Google Deal, AOL Purchase & Pleasing Investors

Yes, this weekend's news is still dominating Techmeme's front page. So again, if you want to read Microsoft's letter to Yahoo or Yahoo's response or future thoughts, check out those links.

Many now believe Yahoo will begin outsourcing their search ads to Google. The advertisers want it based on the past test, it seems like Yahoo and Google both enjoyed it. So we should hear some news on that this week.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a member complaining that after he signed up with Microsoft adCenter, he noticed his site was removed from the Live Search index. For those that do not know, adCenter is the search ad product that goes along side the organic, pure and unbiased search results at Live Search.

To my surprise, an official Microsoft adCenter representative came into the thread and said:

I can understand the importance of this matter and I am happy to assist in this.

Can you please contact support and have this documented so that we can launch an investigation. Thanks so much.

Does that mean that if you are an adCenter advertiser, Microsoft will assist you with your ranking issues in the organic search side? If Google or Yahoo ever did this, all hell would break loose. I hope this was a miscommunication on the Microsoft side, because this implies, strongly implies, that there is not separation between the paid side and organic side of their search services. (Or maybe I am still sick and I missed something).

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Seattle Times reports that Microsoft has launched a brand new Live Search News portal that combines video, news, and video.

It's not that different than Google News, WebmasterWorld member Robert Charlton says. He notes that Google feels more like a "big city newspaper" than Live Search News, but notes that there's some localized news on Live Search's end. (I'm still in Puerto Rico so I see no local news at all and I may be at a disadvantage with my reporting, though forum members do believe that it's being rolled out in different geographic locations at different times.)

The other big observation is that Microsoft is feeding news releases whereas Google is offering secondary and tertiary news sources where applicable. That said, many forum members believe that Microsoft has much work to do to make it a comparable service to Google News.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

There is some recent additional chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread, that was discussing the Live Search March Update, from late March.

It appears from the chatter that Microsoft is either still working out the kinks in the past update or rolling out a new update. We have two forum posts that suggest this behavior:

"Anyone else see the update rolled back?"

No I see a shake up going on right now

I think I have never seen such an awful SERPS in my life. It's a total disaster now. Lot of widget-in-domain.com, shopzillas, and spammy junk.

It looks like link quantity rules, and link quality doesn't matter. I can see websites that have nothing but 1,000s of links from article directories and spammy blogs ranking 1st to 3rd in a quite competitive niches.

The discussion continues about how much webmasters and SEOs dislike the current state of Live Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft's CEO, Ballmer, sent Yahoo's board members a public letter saying:

If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board.

Basically, if you do not accept our offer in three weeks, then we will acquire you another way.

The news flew through the blogosphere and news pipelines, you can see a piece of that articles and blog posts at Techmeme.

There is some discussion on this at the forums. If you want to read SEO and Webmaster reactions, check out WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Personally, this just seems like corporate bullying done through the PR teams. I wonder how Yahoo's shareholders will see this and how this will impact any decision Yahoo makes. Thankfully, I am not in Yang or Decker's shoes right now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Then this morning, Yahoo responds that they have rejected their offer. Not because they are opposed to a deal with Microsoft, but because they feel the price under values what Yahoo is worth. In short, Microsoft, if you want us, give us more money.

The search world was in for a surprise this morning when it was formally announced the Jim Lanzone will replace Steve Berkowitz as Senior Vice President of Microsoft Online Services which includes the Live.com search engine. Berkowitz had previously announced that he would be stepping down in August of 2008, but last week he indicated he would be leaving earlier for personal reasons and would announce a successor. Berkowitz quickly announced Jim Lanzone as his formal successor early this morning. Many have speculated recently that Lanzone and Berkowitz had been co-horting for sometime to eventually bring Lanzone over to Microsoft. Both men had previously held the position as CEO of Ask and it was not hard for both of their names to be mentioned in the same sentence over the last few years. Berkowitz had been known to criticize Google in the past with comments that Google was the model T of search and needed to evolve. It's expected Jim Lanzone will follow suit with similar Google colloquialisms once he takes Berkowitz's place in the next few weeks.

Lanzone who recently left Ask.com had been replaced by Jim Safka in January 2008. Ask embarked on a new course in March that included the layoff of 40 employees and a refocusing of its' search engine towards 30-something women, a decision many were not happy about. Lanzone will have some big shoes to fill replacing Berkowitz at such an important time in Microsofts steady advance on Yahoo and its' grab on the search business it feels it deserves.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, Digitalpoint Forums, and Cre8asite Forums.

The other day we reported on the March 2008 Live Search update. Most of the feedback was that Microsoft took a step backwards in relevancy and spam and their new index is poor, to say the least.

MSNDude, Microsoft's Live Search representative at WebmasterWorld came into the forum thread and completely violated them. He asked for specifics and we all know that WebmasterWorld does not allow specifics. He asked:

I am looking into this and could use some sample queries where you are seeing problems. I have tried the "cheap hotels" example, but I could use some more specific examples to test with.

Please post the term and the query link and we will take a look.

Soon after, the moderator of the forum told members not to post specifics, but it was too late. Some of the example queries include:

• lower my car payments
• vista
• cutts
• bush
• ballmer

The moderator asks you to Sticky Mail MSNDude instead, so here is a quick link to email MSNDude via WebmasterWorld. Send him good examples so he can have the engineers look into improving the index.

As you can tell, I like picking on Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like there was a major update over at Microsoft Live Search. The update appears to have begun some time yesterday morning.

The update was suppose to loosen up the spam filter a bit to allow the crawler to index more sites and include those sites in the search results. Maybe Microsoft tweaked that filter just a bit too much.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread, many are complaining that the search results seem to be full of poor quality sites. Here are some of the responses at WebmasterWorld:

MSN has done another update and they now have HORRIBLE results. It's ALMOST as bad as Yahoo's now and that's bad!

Even WebmasterWorld's Live Search moderator, caveman, commented:

Don't often comment in update threads anymore, but am forced to agree. Oddly, both authoritative sites (often with ranking pages that should not have ranked), and quality niche sites, seem to have taken a hit on this go around. I expect it had something to do with ridding their SERP's of the dominance of stray pages from high auth sites (i.e., where the stray pages were ranking too well), but the net result has been more pages from iffy, third tier sites ranking than I have seen in long while.

A lot of spammy mini-nets too. Reminds me of Yahoo five years ago. Especially the weird stuff, like niche sites with top ranking homepages, and badly performing high level subpages. Illogical, split personality stuff.

He adds that he believes Microsoft's geo-targeting and local-detection algorithms seem off as well.

The update before this one might have been on February 6, 2008, but Microsoft rarely confirms an update has taken place, so we typically don't get official confirmation.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last December, we reported that MSNBot was failing a reverse DNS lookup. Well, guess what folks - MSNBot is failing again on some IP addresses.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread brought this to my attention and I verified it myself. Here is a sample crawl of MSNBot 1.1, the new MSNBot, crawling under the IP address 65.55.232.12 and the reverse lookup propagates to a host name of bl1sch2041303.phx.gbl with no A-Record for bl1sch2041303.phx.gbl on the domain phx.gbl.

The thread has other IP addresses with MSNBot acting stealthy:
65.55.104.29 - - [29/Feb/2008:02:46:46 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 *** "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.104.173 - - [07/Mar/2008:03:53:54 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 *** "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.54.165.47 - - [08/Mar/2008:14:05:33 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 *** "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

The one above is mine, but there are other MSNBot crawls that do pass the reverse DNS test, just some are not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are two recent threads in different forums complaining about search engine spiders from Microsoft.

A WebmasterWorld thread is specifically complaining about MSRbot, Microsoft's research bot, for attempting to crawl pages that don't exist. The other thread is from DigitalPoint Forums, which is just pointing out how busy MSNBot is on his particular forum.

The MSRbot is reportedly "asking for non-existent page" and the "URLs it supplied in UA string," can't be reach anywhere, said the WebmasterWorld member. Reportedly this has been an issue since back in April 2003 and is still going on today. It does not appear to be associated with the Live Search team, however.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Whether or not Yahoo accepts Microsoft's bid, Microsoft seems heavily invested in search and will continue to look to compete with Google, according to Reuters. In an interview, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that Yahoo would help make the process easier, but even if they don't, Microsoft will focus on competing with Google:

"We can afford to make big investments in the engineering and marketing that needs to get done. We will do that with or without Yahoo," said Gates in an interview with Reuters.

"But we also see that we'd get there faster if the great engineering work that Yahoo has done and the great engineers there were part of the common effort," said Gates, who is Microsoft's biggest shareholder.

A lot of forum members believe that Microsoft is quite far from competing with Google in the world of search. After all, Bill Gates once considered the Internet a passing fad.

But others feel that there's more to it. Perhaps this is a wake up call for Yahoo to join Team Microsoft (to form Team MicroHoo, of course) because it is probably Yahoo's goal to defeat Google as well.

Even so, people don't believe that Microsoft and Yahoo can really merge and become one unit. One member says, " I think they would be better served by developing their own tech." Perhaps that's true.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Ever since the last quarter of 2007, SEOs and Webmasters have been complaining about not being indexed in Live Search. In short, many sites that were once indexed and ranking in Live Search were no longer. Plus, many new sites that one would have thought would be indexed and rank well in Live Search, were not.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread reportedly has a note from a Microsoft representative (note, this may be removed soon, so trust me it was posted). Here is a quote from a member named "nickreynolds."

The Live Search team is in the process of modifying the algorithms we use to determine which sites are indexed by Live Search index and which sites receive a ranking so our crawlers will visit the site. At the end of September we launched new ranking and indexing algorithms that were stricter than we anticipated, and we are now changing them to bring back many sites that were removed from our index or given a lower rank. We apologize that it is taking so long to remedy this situation, and we are treating it very seriously. Having high quality content is important to us and we want to make sure we get this right.

We do not have an exact date for fixing this issue, but our plan is to have it resolved near the end of spring. This is our number one priority and we have put all our resources into solving it and bringing a better balance to our indexing so it won't happen again. We appreciate your patience while we resolve this issue, and hope you understand that at this time there is nothing we can do to modify or improve your site's index or ranking.

So as you can see, Microsoft admits their Live Search September 2007 update caused many sites to get deindexed from Live Search. The new update, which I believe we have seen signs of a couple weeks ago, should bring back many of the sites that were impacted by this "stricter algorithm." Of course, we do not have an exact date of when this new update will go live, but as I said above, on February 6th, many Webmasters reported a small Live Search update, which seems to have died down. It may have been some quick tests by the Microsoft Live Search team.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Live Search Blog announced several updated to their crawler. The first is a name change to reflect the upgrade, previously named msnbot/1.0, it is now named msnbot/1.1.

The bulk of the changes include the HTTP Compression and Conditional Get support.

HTTP compression is supported by many other bots already and is now supported by Microsoft. So for a more efficient crawl, Microsoft now supports gzip and deflate compression methods.

The Conditional Get will aid the crawler in deciding if it should crawl your page again. If you haven't made a change to your page, then crawling the page would not be too efficient. So Microsoft's crawler will include the "If-Modified-Since" header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, the crawler will include the "If-None-Match" header and the ETag value in the GET request. If content has not changed, the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response.

Sebastian has a Q&A with Nathan Buggia from Microsoft on these changes and Vanessa Fox has a look at how other search engines handle it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Tamar reported a couple weeks ago that Microsoft put a bid in for Yahoo. We learned over the weekend that Yahoo would reject the offer and they would possibly partner with AOL to prevent a hostile take over by Microsoft.

What does this all mean for search marketers? Right now, I wouldn't even speculate. There are just way too many variables right now. To start making guesses as to which way Yahoo might go? If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, if Yahoo partners with AOL, if Yahoo sticks at it alone??? Even if one of the above transactions happens tomorrow and it won't happen in a day, we as search marketers still have a tremendous amount of time to prepare for it.

Let's say Yahoo merges with AOL. The consolidation of technologies, if and when it happens, would be so far down the road that it would be pointless to speculate the consequences of such an event before we know what might happen.

If you are a stock holder, then it is a different story. But search marketers can sit back and watch.

In any event, this is major search news and the forums are buzzing up and down on the topics. Here are some threads from over the weekend on the news:

• Yahoo in Merger Talks with AOL, WebmasterWorld
• Yahoo May Merge with AOL, Search Engine Watch Forums
• Yahoo Rejects Microsoft!!! Breaking News!, DigitalPoint Forums
• Yahoo to Reject Microsoft Bid, WebmasterWorld
• The Impact on Google Adsense of Microsoft Buying Yahoo, WebmasterWorld
• Yahoo Has Formally Rejected Microsoft Bid, WebmasterWorld

If the Microsoft bid for Yahoo goes through, Reuters says that they might have to borrow money to make it happen.

"It's likely we're actually going to borrow for the first time," said [Microsoft CFO Chris] Liddell in an annual strategy meeting with analysts. "It's going to be a mixture of the cash we have on hand plus debt."

Is that the end for Microsoft? Some people think that borrowing the money is a really bad idea.

Does anyone else think that they are underestimating the cost of integrating Yahoos services into their portfolio? If they are borrowing money for the purchase, how are they going to finance rewriting all the software?

Others, however, are more optimistic:

They have 19B in cash reserves, and just a year ago they had over 40B in cash reserves. They make about $17 billion in profit a year, so I don't see any major issues here. In the worst case, they can issue bonds or choose other alternatives.

Brett Tabke feels that this might just be too high of an asking price.

Personally, I have strongly mixed emotions on the deal. I hate to see competition decreased in the search space, but I agree that the Microsoft offer is a natural and evolutionary thing for them to do. They need to do it.

However, the offer price seems insanely high to me. Especially if daddy warbucks has to go with hands out to banks to make the deal work. Lets be honest, Yahoo's market share in search is going to continue to erode. They have thrown up little in the last year that will stop or even slow down the Google steam roller. How can Microsoft make $44b possibly work? That seems soo high - too high for a falling giant.

Many agree on that point.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. It will be more interesting to see its impact on others in the search space.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

There are a few updates to an old thread at WebmasterWorld that show signs of activity at Microsoft Live Search.

Two webmasters are reporting seeing changes in rankings at Live Search starting on February 4th. Here are those reports:

A couple days ago I hit the jackpot. Let's hope this continues. I don't know much about MSN ranking, so don't ask me how.

Ack... one of my U.S. sites dropped completely off the map for a two word term.

Now the top 10 have stuff from overseas. Like - "Yeah... I'm going to order my _____ from Australia... COME ON!"

Like always, with any update, some are happy and some are sad. There can only be one number one ranking, right?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

After Google learned of the bid for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, the Google blog responded harshly to the possibilities of an acquisition. David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer of Google, writes:

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

It also seems that Google is trying their hardest to thwart the deal. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google's Eric Schmidt has called Yahoo's Jerry Yang to broker some sort of other deal.

The Google blog post also says:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

Many WebmasterWorld forum members have found flaws with this sentiment. One member calls it hypocritical to even make such a statement:

Ah, the hypocrisy! Google already has this very inappropriate influence on the internet. Quite an offensive statement from Google IMHO.

What about Google's claim on "openness?" Perhaps that's the case in America, but not elsewhere, like China.

Talk about calling the kettle black.

Perhaps Google can explain that 'openness' to the people of China. Google caved to the communist government and censored search results for the sake of profits.

On DigitalPoint Forums, members liken the blog post to Google "crying and complaining" about the proposed acquisition.

And finally, the blog post is scrutinized on Digg, where the highest-voted comment talks about Google's current search share:

I find it interesting that Google would accuse Microsoft of trying to build a monopoly over Internet-related businesses, considering that Google has over 60% of the search market. While a 60% share is hardly a monopoly, Yahoo and Microsoft combined will have just 32%, leaving Google as the dominant player.

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

In an unexpected move this morning, Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion move to acquire Yahoo. Needless to say, it has come as a shock to everyone.

What's in store? We're not sure, but we hope it's good.

I thought this was coming... especially after Bill Gates kind of hinted for something big to happen on CNBC the other day.

I just hope they keep Yahoo's properties under the Yahoo name but put in Live search.

And others are seeing the promise of fewer major search engines to worry about in SEO:

So in the future only two search engines to optimize for..... :)

Some people already saw it coming.

Yes, I predicted this sometime ago when the rumour mills were working overtime. This is only natural and the only way to counter Google. Combining the resources of MSFT and YHOO, they may be able to create a stronger search brand. Yahoo will almost certainly need to accept.

All I have to say is wow. It'll be interesting to see if any other companies step up to bid for Yahoo in the interim. This is the news to watch this month.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, HighRankings Forum, and Sphinn (hi Danny!).

Guess what? Beyond the value that Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Portal has for gaining statistical information about your website, it also has an added bonus of the ability to connect with the Live Search team. A WebmasterWorld member says that if you're not ranking at all in Live Search, the team at the Webmaster Portal actually listen to your complaints, especially since there's a good number of complaints that sites don't seem to rank on MSN Live Search at all.

Suggest you get your site validated with their webmastertools, POST YOUR PROBLEM and keep up with those posts. You can also submit your site for manual review if you like.

Since submitting your request from the "Feedback" button (bottom of the Live Search Results) page seems to be unanswered, using the portal might be your best bet. You just have to be persistent. Unfortunately, Live Search is not as fast at indexing pages as it used to be, but hopefully that will change (especially due to the Fast Search acquisition).

One of my sites, Schwag Addict, seems to be a good candidate for the portal. I rank #1 on Ask, Yahoo, and Google for "schwag addict" as expected, but I'm nowhere to be found on Live Search. The site doesn't seem to rank at all. It's good to know that I have some recourse with the tool, as others feel the same way.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Postscript Barry: I am told it is not clear from Tamar's post that this seems to be a pattern happening to many webmasters. As you can see from the forum thread at WebmasterWorld, many SEOs and webmasters are noticing that new sites are simply not ranking well in Live Search. I asked Tamar if it was true for her new site, and she had no idea if it was until after she looked and said - yes, it appears to be true on her site as well. So, generally, these days, Live Search is slow to rank newer sites well in the results.

We have been reporting about Microsoft's issues with handling 301 permanent redirects since September 2006. We came back to the issue this past December but still, Webmasters are complaining at the lack of support for 301 redirects in Microsoft's Live Search.

A 301 redirect typically tells a search engine that page A (old URL) moved permanently to page B (a new URL). A search engine will see that 301 status code and log that the new URL is in a new location. Over time, a search engine would replace the original URL with the new URL in the search results, as well as transfer all or most of the links and signals associated with the original URL to the new URL. Google is fast with this, Yahoo picks up on this and although Ask.com is slow, they eventually get it as well.

Microsoft seems not to pick up on 301 redirects.

A WebmasterWorld thread has continued discussion on the topic of Microsoft's inability to properly handle the 301 status code.

One member claims speaking with a Live Search engineer:

Yeah, I spoke to various people even a particular person from Live Search. They confirmed that at the moment, Live can't handle 301 redirects.

I trust they are working on this issue, hope so at least.

Well - it has been long enough, don't you think? Let's make this a priority if possible. Google handled it big time when you guys changed from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com across millions of different URLs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I noticed an update to the WebmasterWorld thread with the discussion of the weird referrals in the form of spam-like referrals coming from Live Search as cloaking tests.

It appears a webmaster is now noticing a bot named MSLIVSOP serving up fake, site-specific keyword referers, as reported earlier. The bot logs the referrer in the form of:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=KEYWORD&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Plus they come from Microsoft IP addresses, the webmaster reports.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

MarketWatch and Search Engine Land have publicized the announcement made yesterday that Microsoft has made a $1.23 billion bid to purchase Norwegian company Fast Search.

Does this mean that a more relevant Live search is on the horizon? It's quite possible, according to some:

Now Microsoft has serious search engine capability rather than the mickey mouse effort it has had up until now.

In fact, Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land recommends that you keep your eyes peeled:

FAST was an early player in the web search market—it developed the AlltheWeb search engine and sold it to Overture in 2003. As part of the deal, Overture got the public AlltheWeb.com site (now a Yahoo property after Yahoo purchased Overture later in 2003), but FAST kept the web crawler technology and has continued to develop it. So Microsoft is getting a market-leading enterprise search company and a world-class web crawler (not to mention some of the smartest engineering talent in search) as part of this deal. Keep an eye on what Microsoft does with this prize over the coming months—it may surprise people.

Hopefully we'll see a lot of growth with the acquisition.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I wish Loren at Search Engine Journal also had a category for Best Search Video Blog and Best Search Podcast, because I would have voted for WebProNew's Video Blog for that one. In Mike McDonalds latest video blog interview, he spent the day with Jeremiah Andrick, the Product Manager of Live Search Webmaster Tools. Jeremiah is an awesome guy and knows how to throw the football around - impressive.

In this interview, Mike and Jeremiah discuss the issue with Microsoft indexing AdSense ad, how Microsoft forgot to turn off one of the link commands, the issues they had with cloaking detection and so much more. The interview is wonderful to watch, I highly recommend it.

Here is the video, but you can see the full size version over here:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread asks if Google indexes and ranks Apple .Mac pages. Basically, .Mac is just a hosting service for Mac users, who pay for a "Dot Mac" subscription.

Googler, JohnMu, said Google does index and rank .Mac files. He linked to a site command for site:web.mac.com that clearly shows Google is indexing those files. But it appears Yahoo is indexing a lot more than Google, while Live Search is about the same as Google.

So in short, search engines have no reason not to index .mac hosted content. Just make sure those pages are search engine friendly and allowed via the robots.txt file and you should be set.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Bill Slawski discovered a patent application by Microsoft that seeks to "restrict the results for queries to be from blog pages."

Does that mean that blogging has had its day? Well, if the key word is restrict and Microsoft is seeking relevancy (since when are blog posts irrelevant?), then maybe they can't limit the number of blog posts that hit the results page.

Some people want this to happen. Tim Dineen, for example, has this to say:

Blogs get a disproportionate boost (relative to their actual usefulness) because they tend to be well-optimized and are more likely to gain links than a typical (albeit just as useful) website developed by a small business or unique content provider who has a web design shop build a site for their content.

Then again, bear in mind that not all blogs use Wordpress. They're using Wordpress and the platform because it's already well optimized, so restricting the results will affect those who decided to develop upon that platform.

And finally, perhaps Microsoft should take a clue from Google's success:

Because blogs are so dynamic and oft-updated, they can often be the best source of results for new events.

I'd imagine why most blogs are still #1 for many searches I perform: because they're relevant!

Here's some additional Search Engine Roundtable coverage on the success of blogs (or why Google likes them):

• Setting Up a Blog - Some Things You Should Know From an SEO Perspective


• SEO Through Blogs and Feeds


• Blog & Feed Search SEO - Blog Optimization Strategies You Need to Know


• Blog and Feed Search SEO

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn

Yesterday, we reported findings that MSN was returning Google AdWords links in their natural search results. Well, Microsoft has responded to this issue on the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog, explaining that it was a complete accident and that it will be fixed in the upcoming days:

The issue stems from the way Live Search handles content disallowed by the Robots.txt file. We regularly check the robots.txt file of a site to ensure that we don't index and cache pages excluded by the webmaster. However, if we do find a link elsewhere on the web pointing to a page excluded by the robots.txt file, we may include the link and the anchor text in our index if we think it might be valuable to our users. Yesterday we accidently began including the links from the ads of Google AdSense customers. The issue has been fixed, and you should see the results disappear from our search results over the next couple days.

Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land explains a little more about this and explains it's primarily due to a new way the Google renders AdSense units, a claim that is neither detailed on Google or Microsoft's side. However, much thanks to Microsoft for responding!

In fact, the problem does seem to be resolved. Try searching for confirmation: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site:www.google.com/pagead. Thanks for the fast turnaround, Microsoft!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Wow, talk about strange issues with MSN Live. I just performed a search on Live.com and the 3rd and 4th results were Google AdWords ads as pictured below:

Actually, I'm not the one to have discovered this. Michael Dorausch spotted it at the Raven SEO blog. Interestingly, this was picked up yesterday and was posted to Sphinn but the problem remains. At least Google removed its raccoon problem in a timely manner. ;)

But as Barry points out at Search Engine Land, Google is blocking this kind of spidering in their robots.txt file and MSN is still crawling the information. In fact, Barry notes that they crawled over 4 million ads.

It makes you wonder what their CTR is and how Google AdWords can possibly track the CTR accurately...

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

In early November I reported that Microsoft's link command came back to life. But it now seems to be up and down, currently down.

The new link command that should work, is the the syntax of +linkdomain:www.seroundtable.com. But as expected, the more people who find out about this plus sign work around, the more likely Microsoft sees those queries and pulls the command offline.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Microsoft's Live Search automatically regionalizing the search results of Live.com when searches are conducted in Australia.

Woz, WebmasterWorld moderator, said Live is "automatically serving results focused towards," plus they have added "an "Australia Only" tick box." Woz says there is no way for him to turn off the local preferences. Here he expresses his frustration:

If I go to live.com I expect to see global results. If I want local MSN results, then I will go to nineman.com.au and search there.

But moderator, bill said he doesn't see the same happening in Japan. So it may be Microsoft testing things out in select countries, like Australia?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday we reported that MSNBot failed some reverse DNS tests. In short, if you did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP addresses of their spiders, it would not resolve to search.live.com. The big issue with this is that Webmasters who have set their servers to block rogue spiders that don't pass reverse DNS tests, would be blocking a legitimate MSNBot and possibly notice a drop in traffic from Live Search.

MSNDude has replied to the WebmasterWorld thread confirming the issue and promising to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Thanks Shurik for detecting this configuration issue on few servers, we will fix that.

Again, this can be a very serious issue for some sites and should be taken seriously by both webmasters and Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A year ago, Microsoft promised to enable Webmasters a method of verifying MSNbot. Way too often, rogue spiders mask themselves as official spiders from Google, Yahoo, Live Search or Ask.com. The search engines have enabled methods to conduct reverse DNS lookups on the fly, so that you can allow those spiders that pass the reverse DNS test in and the others, deny at your gate.

I opened up my log files for rustybrick.com and found these records for MSNBot, Microsoft Live Search's spider.

65.54.165.35 www.rustybrick.com - [05/Dec/2007:01:44:46 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 23 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" "-"
65.54.165.35 www.rustybrick.com - [05/Dec/2007:01:44:47 -0500] "GET /seo_articles_8e.php HTTP/1.0" 200 11224 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" "-"

Now if you do a reverse DNS lookup on this IP, 65.54.165.35, you will notice it returns the host name "by1sch4030208.phx.gbl" and not "livebot-[IP-Adress].search.live.com" as promised.

If you have implemented a reverse DNS lookup requirement for MSNBot, be warned that you may be blocking MSNBot from crawling your site, because Microsoft did not properly set up this IP block to reverse DNS to search.live.com.

The whois information for the IP confirms it is owned by Microsoft, but the reverse DNS does not.

jdMorgan, a WebmasterWorld moderator, said in the WebmasterWorld thread that there "are actually two PTR records for addresses in that range; If your server checks only the first (which appears to be a CNAME), then it may fail rDNS verification. The second record points to hotmail.com." But in any event, this is still a major issue for some webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been corresponding with Microsoft about the weird spam-like referrals Live Search was sending to hundreds, if not thousands, of web site log files throughout the web. On September 6th, a Microsoft representative confirmed that these were actual tests being conducted by the Live Search team - but did not expand upon that. Since these tests continued to linger on until even today, Microsoft has shared more details with us what exactly this test is about.

The answer is, Microsoft was testing for cloaking. A post by the Live Search team scheduled to go live at 3PM (EST) named Live Search and Cloaking Detection has all the details. In short, Microsoft explains that "one of these tools is an extension to MSNBot, giving us an additional way to detect cloaking."

But as I reported three times in the past by way of the WebmasterWorld thread, these tests were running havoc on log files, causing concern and questions as to where these referrals were coming from and why. So the answer is, it is a form of MSNBot used to detect cloaking.

Microsoft has now promised that this MSNBot will not impact your AdSense/Overture reporting, will not statistically impact your site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic, will not continue to "pollute" your HTTP logs with inappropriate terms (spam keywords), and Microsoft will respond to your questions in their forum or via this form.

I asked Microsoft a few questions about their announcement, here is the Q&A:

Q: How have you come up with a way "to optimize the crawler and most webmasters should notice the referrer traffic dropping to almost nothing over the next month." Will traffic still be inflated overall, but you won't pass a referral data?
A: Webmasters might still see some referral data being passed, but the keywords will be relevant to their sites, and it should not be statistically significant for any sized website. If webmasters are continuing to see issues, we recommend they contact us through our forums or feedback form.

Q:Why did Microsoft use spammy keywords as the referrer data in your initial tests?
A:We were using a common list of terms to test against all websites when we first launched this tool. We have now optimized the tool to use only keywords that are relevant to your website.

Q:Have you consulted with Google or Yahoo on how they handle the cloaking issue? If so, can you provide any details on that? Would you say you handle the cloaking issues the same way?
A:There are some commonalities in how all the major search engines detect cloaking, however, we can only comment on our own system.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Scott Hendison (who I met at a variety of search conferences and will see at Pubcon -- hi!) blogged about MSN ignoring 301 redirects: a site he had that ranked #1 in MSN was completely gone. After investigation, he found that the 301 was being ignored:

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page.

Over at Sphinn, it's not a shock. Apparently MSN has been doing this for years. Yahoo and Google took awhile to sort out their redirects. The question is: does Microsoft know about it and do they intend to fix it?

Some suggest that they don't:

It's been a known fact that Microsoft prefers making new standards rather than follow it.

Well, what's the new standards for a permanently moved page?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

How would you go about submitting a reinclusion request for a site that may have been banned from MSN unfairly?

MSNdude says that you can visit http://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlsearch&ct=eformts and ask for reinclusion.

Forum members at WebmasterWorld are frankly disappointed in MSN's reinclusion procedures. From what others say, if you've been wrongfully banned, you're forever condemned.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In September, we reported that Microsoft's Live Search spam-like referrals are official tests performed by Microsoft and that blocking them could have you delisted from the search results.

A bunch of forum members are still reporting this "abnormal" activity and have seen it for about a month now. Unfortunately, this negatively impacts these users' analytics.

How long is this supposed to last? One member said one week. But a month? What is the purpose?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

As many of you saw in the first images of Live Search Webmaster Tools, webmasters can now login to Live Search Webmaster Tools and find their "Domain Rank" and the "Rank" of their top pages.

Here is an image of "Domain Rank":

And here is an image of my "Top Five Pages" by "Rank":

Why is Microsoft calling these bars "Rank"? Why are they green bars? Is it way too similar to Google's PageRank brand?

Other questions I had was, do people actually see pages with less than five green bars? The answer to that is yes. Some folks at a DigitalPoint Forums thread reported having only one bar for some of his sites.

Anyway, is this too similar to Google? Remember Yahoo's WebRank score in their toolbar?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

About a week ago, I provided exclusive screen shots of the new Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Tools portal. It appears that as of last night, Microsoft has released the http://webmaster.live.com/ to the public, as a beta.

So far, there is a lot of discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld on the release and not much about the features inside of the tool.

Ben, Chris and I discussed some of those features on the Search Pulse last night. In short, Microsoft has a long way to go with this tool. Very long way to go.

There is currently not much help documentation, nor support for the tool as far as I can see. You can give feedback about the tool over here, if you are signed into the "Connect site."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Sphinn and WebmasterWorld thread report that you can now use the link commands at Live.com again.

The syntax appears to be slightly different as Karen Blakeman notes. For a link command, you need to use +link:www.domain.com/filename and for a linkdomain command, you need to use +linkdomain:www.domain.com. Here is an example link domain command for this site:

Search For: +linkdomain:www.seroundtable.com and you should see results, if not, I have taken a screen capture to prove it.

Microsoft first pulled the link command features back in March of this year, and then told us it was because mass automated usage. It is because of that, it remained off for so long. But just last week I posted screen captures of the new Live Search Webmaster Portal which is suppose to give webmasters access to that data. Unfortunately, it did not give enough access to that data. So maybe this new command is the way they enable some webmasters to see this linkage data?

I have a feeling Microsoft will pull this command soon after they find the SEO and webmaster community using it rapidly.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums member is baffled by an article he read where Bill Gates is working on developing software that can read your mind. Is this a good direction for both Microsoft (as a competitive edge over Google) and for advertising?

It looks like people are all experimenting with this type of advertising. Bill Slawski, for example, brings up a term called neuromarketing and explains what it is:

An emerging technique called neuromarketing that uses brain scans to measure human response to promotional messages is starting to catch on in Europe—and soon ads may become even more effective at prompting you to pull out your wallet.

That's a bit frightening, actually, but some folks can see it to be inevitable. One member suspects that Google won't be far behind, so Microsoft won't have the advantage.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

After you login, the first thing you need to do is set up a profile for a site you want to validate:

Once the profile is set up, Microsoft gives you an option to include a META tag in your header or an XML file in your root directory, so Microsoft can validate you are the owner of the site. I opted for the XML file and here are the directions below:

Once you are validated, the site goes into your webmaster tools section:

By clicking on the domain, up comes a summary about the site:

You get information like last crawl date, "domain rank," the number of indexed pages, if you are blocking the crawlers, and your top five pages by rank.

Clicking over the the "profile" section gives you the ability to revalidate your site, add an XML site map and update your email address:

There is also a "Keywords" link to show you how well you rank for particular keywords. You enter in a keyword phrase into the box and click search. Then it shows you the results of that keyword phrase:

There is a simple link tool that shows you your top 10, aka your most valuable, incoming links:

Then it shows you your top links outwards to external sites:

Plus, here is the page to input your Sitemap address:

They even give you a simple tool to validate your robots.txt file:

That pretty much covers it.

The most interesting piece is the way Microsoft illustrates the importance of your domain and pages by showing green rank bars.

We had a feeling this was coming soon, in fact, I hear others have access to it already, but no one posted any screen captures yet.

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

After almost one month of the Live Search URL Submission form being down, it is now back up at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

On October 9th, a WebmasterWorld thread reported the form was down, and it remained down until msnDude saw a different WebmasterWorld thread, saying:

Our URL submission page is still http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

But he didn't seem to realize it was down when he said that. So soon after, it appears Microsoft fixed the URL submission form.

Honestly, I am not sure how often a search engine uses the URLs they obtain from a URL submission form to find new pages. The form being down at MSN for about a month, might be proof of that. But it is now live and you can submit URLs, if it makes you feel better.

Again, the best way to have any search engine find your pages is through links on pages that they already have indexed.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft announced that they will be launching the Live Search Webmaster Portal, similar to Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central.

Microsoft started inviting webmasters into the beta starting around August 31st of this year. I have not heard of anyone actually seeing the portal, as of yet. But that might change real soon.

Yesterday, I personally received an invite to the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta. The email read:

On behalf of the entire Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta team, we are very happy to invite you to be one of the first beta users. We look forward to working with you over the coming months on the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program. Please confirm your participating webmaster/SEO manager contact(s) by sending an email to XXXXXX@microsoft.com.

An email invite to join the Connect site for this beta will follow shortly from XXXXXX@microsoft.com (you may want to add this address to your junk mail filter’s “Safe Senders” list). You will be asked to accept the Terms of Use for the beta program, and will then be entered into the queue for assignment of credentials to the Webmaster Portal.

Thank you again for your support of the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta.

So I have a feeling, I will be seeing something really soon. I am still awaiting that email, so time will tell.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Those of you have been anxiously awaiting the launch of Microsoft Gatineau can now sign up. The sign up form is here and is available only for US subscribers for the time being.

What is the benefits of Gatineau, you ask? adCenterEU says the following:

Project Gatineau is closely related to adCenter – for example, adCenter customers will be able to use their existing account to access Project Gatineau if they choose to use the web analytics service.

But it also a full-fledged web analytics offering with a lot of great reports and tools for measuring your site traffic and understanding your visitors:

- Click and visitor tracking

- Marketing campaign reporting

- Conversion tracking

- Demographic and geographic segmentation

- Paid and natural search analysis

- Visitor information including browsers, languages, operating systems and resolutions

You will need to create an adCenter account but you won’t need to buy any advertising – the account can be used for Gatineau only.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A New York Times article discusses the Open Content Alliance, an initiative to put books online for everyone's consumption regardless of affiliation.

This is in stark contrast to restrictions put in place by both Google and Microsoft who also want to scan library books and make them available online but by limiting the libraries from sharing the books with other commercial search services.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

WebmasterWorld members are cheering for the libraries.

I think this is great news, and in the spirit of libraries. A commercial business person may walk into any library and browse any book. Why should Big-G or M$ get to convert such a freedom of information into their own revenue stream?

True. An additional kudos goes to the libraries because they have to actually pay the Open Content Alliance to have their books scanned; Google/Microsoft don't impose fees. Still, the libraries are doing the right thing, according to forum members.

Why can't Google share with everyone? We're all about information retrieval and accessibility, so why prevent that due to competition?

In the name of Do No Evil, why not just donate cash to the libraries and the Open Content Aliance so everyone can benefit from the work?

I think that would be the best solution for everyone.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

First came Google Voice Search, and now Microsoft has followed suit. The LA Times reports that Microsoft has rolled out Live Search Mobile:

Live Search Mobile, which users have to download to their handsets, displays listings and driving directions on maps.

You can get to it on the Live Search Mobile site, where it's available in three flavors: Windows Mobile Devices (wls.live.com), Blackberry devices (also wls.live.com), and any mobile phone (m.live.com).

The voice search phone number is 1-800-CALL-411, which is a completely free service.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had acquired shopping site Jellyfish, according to WebmasterWorld members.

Is the the beginning of a new Microsoft search engine? After all, Microsoft unveiled some new features on Live.com last week. Moderator pageoneresults wonders if that's the case:

With the upcoming change in Live and how commercial results are being served, is Microsoft becoming more of a "Commercial Shopping Portal" as opposed to just a regular search engine?

Skeptics think that maybe Microsoft is just trying to show something new. Personally, I've been an early subscriber to Jellyfish after it was featured in TechCrunch, especially with regards to the Jellyfish Smack feature. It would be nice to see some lower prices and cooler deals out of the acquisition, but I may be holding my breath. ;)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a move that appears to rival the existence of Google Docs, Microsoft has announced that it is bringing MS Office to the web. The caveat: you can only view documents, not edit them.

A few people are baffled by this, since it appears that Google and other applications seem to have a real solid product with full collaboration and editing functionality. WebmasterWorld members suspect that it won't be long until Microsoft gives more access to the platform.

I suspect editing capability will come if Microsoft starts feeling a real pinch from fully functional online suites.

This provides document accessiblity from anywhere, which is at least a step in the right direction. This lets them postpone the inevitable decision of how to charge, or whether to charge at all, for online document creation and editing.

On the other hand, if Microsoft chooses to charge for the program, users believe that Google Docs will win out, since it remains free.

And of course, Linux users are a bit suspicious in general, but they believe that the tools will still appeal to the average computer user.

You can sign up for Microsoft Office Live Workspace or Microsoft Office Live Small Business right now and will be alerted when the beta is available for your review.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As expected early last week, Microsoft announced the "New Live Search". Todd, Oilman, posted live coverage, as did Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land of the Searchification event at Microsoft.

Here is what Microsoft explained is new:

• Relevance, relevance, relevance.  We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches.  Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results. 


• Speed.  Pages load much faster than before.


• Streamlined look and feel.  We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site.  For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.


• More high-interest content.  You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.

In the coming weeks we’ll blog in detail about the improvements that we’ve made.  You can also check out the press release that just hit the wire and the fact sheet for more information.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land goes deep on these changes posting screen captures of many of the new features.

So what is the verdict in the various forums? We have two large threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums. The general consensus in the forums is that the search results are no better than they were. Here are select quotes from the forum thread:

If MS thinks their results have been better than Y! since 2006 someone should be ordered to take a drug and alcohol test.

Boy I looked at a few SERP's and they are terrible, unless you are a guestbook/blog spammer. Maybe I'm in competitve spaces, but all I see are .edu spammed URL's.

Some of the discussion at DigitalPoint Forums is more positive, because they have seen increases in traffic to their site from Live.com, but not due to perceived relevancy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The other day we reported on a Live.com Search Update & Design Update. The other week, in conjunction with our post, the LiveSide blog captured dozens of screen captures of "Live Search 2.0" in action.

Ever since then, I see people popping up in the forums spotting a new algorithm and design for Microsoft's Live.com search engine.

Microsoft actually "spilled the beans" on the launch, posting a blog post too early that read something like:

In a blog posting on Thursday, Windows Live program manager Akram Hussein demonstrated how the revamped Live Search handles searches for digital cameras, showing not just product details, but also reviews. The new search scrapes details from other sites that have user reviews and other information and presents it from within the search engine.

In any event, this new design and "algorithm" is on it's way. Will it be better? Time will tell. It is hard to get worse (ouch!).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

TexTex reports at a WebmasterWorld thread about an algorithm and design update at Live.com.

No one else saw what Tex saw. Tex described it as:

It was a totally different index...with a different look aesthetically..it has since disappeared.

Although no one really saw it, Tex is not imagining things. Danny covered the new look, as did Gary.

Danny posted a screen shot of the green home page, which has since been pulled:

Danny explains this is part of Microsofts Searchification event to be held later this month.

Microsoft has invited a number of bloggers and journalists for the event next week, on September 26. But Microsoft apparently can't wait to release some things, since Live.com is now sporting a new home page.

So if you saw it, it was real and don't think you are going crazy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It's been 8 months since I initially reported on Microsoft Gatineau, and now the forums have gotten hold of the news. DigitalPoint Forums members are happy to see that other alternatives are available, and Search Engine Roundtable Forums members are excited to see the new features.

For more information about Gatineau, you can check David Naylor's website or the video presentation.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

ZDNet has announced that Microsoft will be holding a 3-hour seminar on September 26 that will act as a launch pad for the newest release of Microsoft Live Search. Here are some proposed additions:

* New personalization capabilities integrated into Live Search * An integrated location/calendar/presence service that may also tie in with Live Search 2.0 * A new capability integrating social networks, annotation (ratings and reviews) and search * Future integration between Outlook and Live Search

The WebmasterWorld community hopes there's more to it than just these user customizations. They're hoping that the results are more relevant and that the pages are crawled in a timely manner.

On the positive side...let's hope indexing of new pages is done in a timely manner, relevancy is MUCH improved and when pages meet MSN guidelines they STAY PUT in the serps...not here today and gone tommorow.

Sounds like a fair request.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This article was composed on September 12th and was scheduled for publication on September 13th.

Yesterday, Search Engine Land announced that Microsoft has launched Windows Live Translator. Essentially, this is Babelfish for Microsoft.

The interface looks pretty impressive, and I'm sure that if I knew any other language besides a little bit of Hebrew, it would work for me. But DigitalPoint Forums members don't think so. In fact, it seems that Google Translate has succeeded.

Then again, the DigitalPoint Forums member was trying to translate a vulgar word, after all. Perhaps there are some filters in play.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Mid-August I reported about Weird Referrals From Microsoft's Live Search. These referrals typically came from Microsoft's IP blocks but also contained weird referral strings that included adult keywords, pharmaceutical keywords, and other spam like keyword phrases.

Last night, the official Microsoft Live Search representative, msndude, responded that these are official Microsoft tests. But the zinger is that if you block these tests, which people are doing because it is skewing their log files, you may be delisted from Microsoft's Live Search and MSN search.

Here is a quote from the thread:

First, we appreciate the concerns and issues that have been raised and apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

Second, we want to explain what this is all about. The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your concerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addresses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

Please keep the feedback and thoughts coming as we will use this to help improve this process and make sure that it impacts your sites as little as possible.

thanks
- msndude (msd)

Long time WebmasterWorld member, incrediBILL, laughs that response off saying:

I understand your need for quality checking but trying to bypass site security just to check for cloaking is a bit much. Besides, it came from Microsoft IPs and was easily detectable (we all caught it) means it can also be easily cloaked so if you think you're really doing quality control you're just fooling yourself.

FWIW, my bot blocker quarantined that IP range as a roque bot a long time ago because your server kept asking for pages and couldn't answer the captcha.

I am a bit puzzled by this test. I so would love a comment from Matt Cutts on this, I know that this is over stepping your area - but as a webmaster, I would love a response from Matt Cutts the webmaster.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago Microsoft Promised Webmasters a Live Search Portal.

Part of that included the ability to be part of the beta, to test out new features. Some Webmasters signed up and have already been invited into the beta.

Starting this Friday, on August 31st, Microsoft began accepting webmasters into the beta.

Microsoft requests the URLs you want to add to the webmaster portal and as of now, you wait. There are currently no reports of the URL to the beta login area. There are also no reports of what the interface looks like and what features it has.

But, people are now being accepted into the beta.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, Microsoft launched Tafiti, a search engine that is powered by its new Silverlight technology. I played around with the features and have showed some screenshots of the new search engine in action.

Once Silverlight is installed, you see a nice little notepad where you can scribble type in your search.

You're then presented with some results and can drag interesting results to a glass pane on the right hand side of your browser.

Then, you can label these saved searches:

The downside is that you have to turn off your popup blocker in order to see any selection. I found that a bit of a hindrance.

WebmasterWorld members feel that the saved search functionality is useful, but there's not much potential for Silverlight. After all, it is a direct competitor to Adobe's Flash which has been around for over a decade.

Even so, it has a "web 2.0" feel, which some members welcome:

Regardless of the result its always good to see companies experiment, especially with a user interface. That said, I think the site, visually, leaves alot to be desired. I have Visual Thesaurus, which I love to use, that makes Tafiti look pretty primitive, but the storing/sharing of multiple searches could be useful.

Others just don't see much use for it.

Google have it right...give people the results with a minumum of fuss and time. waiting for those animations every time I do a search would drive me up the wall.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Many are excited that Microsoft has announced that they will be building out a webmaster portal. The portal will be similar to that of Yahoo's Site Explorer of Google's Webmaster Central.

As Danny Sullivan explains, the portal will help consolidate forms and help documentation, plus offer tools on:

• Linking data
• Indexing data
• Crawling data

Microsoft is now accepting private beta requests, just email lswmp@microsoft.com to make your request.

When should we expect the launch of these tools? Microsoft says it will be "available publicly in late Fall." I certainly hope so. Why am I skeptical? They have made promises in the past and did not come through until just recently.

So we will see...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports several webmasters finding weird referrers from Microsoft's Live Search.

I am getting thousands of hits where the items in my log show the referrer as follows; http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=KEYWORD&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP

When I load the referred page then I am told that there are no results. Also there is no relationsfip between the keyword and the page requested. The Kkeywords are single words and seem to be mainly concerned with the normal spam areas.

The consistent item in all these referrals is the &FORM=LVSP portion of the URL.

Many of the referrals come for adult related keywords.

But when they try to view the referring URL, no information comes up, that would logically imply a referrer came from that page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread points to Microsoft's most recent statements of their focus on search:

Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its Web search business remains on a "positive trajectory" with plans to roll out several updates over the next 12 months.

Of course, since their search technology is lagging behind, the WebmasterWorld members are taking this with a bit of humor.

The only possible trajectory for Live.com is positive.

They are so far behind in understanding search it is laughable.

But instead of whining, administrator Engine reminds everyone to focus on this as a positive thing for Microsoft, and I agree.

Let's welcome the initiative, rather than simply moan and groan about the current status. This is a forward looking prediction where they are aware of the issues and are intending to make changes. Constructive criticism will help them, and us.

I hope it goes well for them.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, the Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive was finalized, with Microsoft looking to close the search engine traffic gap between itself and with Google/Yahoo.

With the acquisition comes the formation of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group which will serve advertisers and publishers.

This new business group will be responsible for building Microsoft’s monetization engine to serve the advertiser and publisher community. The APS team will assume responsibility for building and marketing all ad platforms, including Atlas, DRIVEpm, MSNDR and Microsoft® AdCenter, along with emerging media types such as in-game and mobile ads, and the agency arm Avenue A ¦ Razorfish.

This looks exciting, and forum members are hoping that there are new avenues of advertising for their perusal. However, this begs the question: with an acquisition that cost double that of Google's DoubleClick acquisition, why is Google being investigated?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (acquisition) and WebmasterWorld (APS group formation).

The official Microsoft Live Search representative at WebmasterWorld said that Microsoft will finally be supporting Sitemaps (for real this time) now. Microsoft will currently support autodiscovery of your sitemap file if it is included within your robots.txt file.

I have been giving Microsoft a hard time about not demonstrating how they will be using the Sitemaps protocol to help Webmasters.

Google, Yahoo and Ask.com all allow you to ping them with the Sitemaps file. Google and Yahoo have Webmaster consoles giving you a way to submit your Sitemap for upload. However, Microsoft, to this day, has nothing, but their word that they will or are supporting it.

Yesterday, Microsoft said that they have "started considering sitemaps in robots.txt and will extend this to most sites within the next few months." Meaning, they are experimenting locating Sitemaps files if they are included in your robots.txt file. But finally, they have admitted that they do not and have not offered "the ability to publish sitemaps via ping or webmaster tools." In addition, they said, they "do not necessarily take into account sitemaps listed in robots.txt files right at this moment."

When will we see Microsoft supporting the Sitemaps protocol they so happily said they would?

As of yesterday, Microsoft will use "autodiscovery for sitemaps through your robots.txt."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In response to Google's announcement to anonymize user data after 18-24 months and possibly the response by Ask.com to launch AskEraser and also to anonymize user data after 18 months, Microsoft has taken a similar stance, according to a Reuters report and Microsoft Press Release.

Specifically, Microsoft said it would make all Web search query data anonymous after 18 months on its "Live Search" service, unless it receives user consent to store it longer. The policy changes are retroactive and worldwide, it said.

WebmasterWorld members think that it's a good step, though many would rather it be defined by the user, possibly in the browser settings.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, and blog buzz continues at Techmeme and Search Engine Land.

Google is gaining momentum in the search sphere, but Microsoft seems to be picking up the pace. According to a Chicago Tribune article, financial analysts expect that over the next decade, Google will take a whopping 90% of the market "through increased spending on research and development."

WebmasterWorld members are not convinced.

10 years ago Google didn't even exist (at least not as a commercial company), what did the analysts back then predict for 2007?

In fact, another WebmasterWorld thread says that Microsoft's search share is increasing. Was that predicted by financial analysts? I don't think it was.

Still, as Danny writes on Search Engine Land, Microsoft is picking up the pace. Could we see them controlling the market in a decade, at least more so than is expected?

For some nostalgia, check out Barry's post from 2004 where he muses about Microsoft's relevancy. Microsoft has gained the market share only in the past few weeks, but I'm not hearing anything about relevancy getting worse. Search is alive and well.

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

In May, we reported that Bill Gates is interested in focusing and bettering their search engine. A WebmasterWorld thread highlights an article in BusinessWeek that emphasizes Microsoft's resolve to focus its energy on acquiring companies that specialize in vertical search.

The article mentions Microsoft's recent acquisitions:

• February 2007: MotionBridge - search for mobile phones
• February 2007: Medostry - health care information database
• March 2007: TellMe Networks - voice recognition for mobile search

The acquisitions—along with Microsoft's efforts to build its own niche search engines to find images, classified ads, and other content—are aimed at finding a chink in Google's seemingly impenetrable armor. "There's a lot of opportunity in domain-specific areas," said Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at a February investment conference highlighting the Medstory purchase. "That search technology is first being woven into MSN Health & Fitness, and ultimately it will be woven into the mainline search."

It is true that Google is the web search giant, but there's potential to break that into verticals, just as there is potential to create social sites that appeal to a different type of audience.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There appears to be some early reports of a Live.com or MSN Search update taking place now.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a few signs and signals from the SEO community that such an update is currently underway.

It is currently not clear if it is a global change or if this update is just affecting certain industries.

We have been seeing some wild swings in MSN search lately, anyone seeing an update in rankings?

Of course, some are seeing poor quality signs.

I thought they had resolved the blogspot problem, but today I see several junk pages ranking well, including the #1 spot for the phrase I am monitoring.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A ton of mapping news came out yesterday. Search Engine Land has a great overview of ma lot of the ones that apply to the search engines.

- Google Launches "Street View" Photography
- Microsoft Virtual Earth Expands 3-D Coverage To Include New York
- MapQuest Introduces New ActionScript API For Richer Maps

Google Street Views:
The Google Lat Long Blog posteda on it linking a video demonstration of it in action. I made my own yesterday at personal blog and here it is showing off my office neighborhood.

Check it out yourself, this is a street level view of around times square

Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D New York:
To see this in action, check out this video and the press release.

I did not demo this because it doesn't run (or run well) on a Mac.

MapQuest API:
Well, Garmin took advantage of it already. Check out MapQuests API for Adobe ActionScript for more information.

Google Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums. Microsoft Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft has issued a press release about its latest acquisition: aQuantive, a massive ad network. The Wall Street Journal has more:

Microsoft Corp. agreed to acquire aQuantive Inc. for $66.50 a share, in an all-cash deal valued at about $6 billion, as the software giant became the latest to buy an online advertising agency.

According to TechCrunch, aQuantive is the parent company to Avenue A | Razorfish, Atlas and DRIVEpm. Our Associate Editor, Chris Boggs, works for Avenue A | Razorfish, but was unable to comment. However, we anticipate some more information shortly.

Discussion on WebmasterWorld has already begun, with people putting this up against Google's acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

So do ya go with DoubleClick or Atlas for an ad server now? If DoubleClick was to expensive at 3.1B, how is Atlas a deal at 6B? Maybe the revenue from the agency unit makes it more financially attractive.

Additional coverage of the news is on Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks about the Microsoft Live link: operator which is still offline. We first reported about the link: operator downtime on March 26, which was nearly two months ago.

A DigitalPoint user references the MSDN blog post from March 28th that says that the operator was taken offline because the tool was being abused:

We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.

However, they add that they're "doing [their] best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries." Since it's been over a month without an update, the community is getting anxious. It was a useful tool, and I hope it comes back soon -- or at least that the MSDN blog gets updated with new information.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread asks a good question, does rotating the content on a page hurt your search rankings.

You need to break this question down into how much content is being rotated in and out. If the whole page changes dynamically all the time, then it may cause a problem. If there are sections on the page that change on refresh, then it may not cause a problem. If the content on the page changes throughout the day, like a news site, then it wont cause much of an issue at all.

The big thing here, in my opinion, is to keep users in mind. Will it confuse your users to have the content changing all the time?

Imagine an e-commerce site with featured products on the home page. You can implement the featured products to dynamically rotate based on page load or you can cache the featured products to remain constant for a certain time period. If a shopper comes to your site and likes a featured product but then comes back and can't find it, it can be an issue.

On news sites or blogs, users understand that new content is added often. So users know what will be on the home page today, may not be on the home page tomorrow. Same with sites designed specifically to change on reload, like the Hot or Not web site (great viral site).

WebmasterWorld moderator, caveman, has a nice response:

There are lots of factors here that we don't have precise information on, but that's OK, because there is also a fair amount of existing knowledge out there about sites that constantly change content on the homepage, and for the most part, it just isn't a problem. IMO, Quadrille's point that this won't help in terms of strict SEO, is a legitimate one, but I never look at SEO anymore in that tight a context.

The reality is the the dominant search engine uses a very links based algo (they all do, really), so while I am a big believer in on-page optimization still mattering, let's get this in perspective...

The title of the page (most important onpage element) is presumably not changing, nor are important subheads, high level page text, and important site nav elements. If those things are not present, they probably should be (especially in this case). If those constant elements are present, and considering the importance of backlinks, the SE's have more than enough info to effectively rank the page.

Further discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bill Gates is determined to keep the Microsoft legacy alive as long as he's working for him. A WebmasterWorld thread references an article by Mr. Gates where he has vowed to keep the online services -- including search -- alive:

Gates, Microsoft's founder, has said that he will work with the company full-time until mid-2008. In his remaining months, he said that his efforts will be mainly directed toward "search, buyers and sellers. ... That will be my biggest thing."

WebmasterWorld moderator skibum thinks this is an "interesting novelty":

It sounds like this says we're determined to focus on using own own proprietary technologies and do our own thing despite what the marketplace wants. Since they are MSFT and they have billions maybe they can make it work.

It's time for innovation, and there's only about a year left for him.

But other moderators think that the focus on these online services can have promise. Receptional adds:

I've seen demos of that - there's a video about it somewhere and it's a potentially awesome (even frightening) technology.

Imagine every image on the web being knitted into its very location in the world, so that you end up with one 3D virtual picture of the planet, that you can view from any angle.

Will it happen? Or is it going to remain as "potentially awesome?"

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

You can also read additional commentary by Barry at Search Engine Land.

After several months in beta, a brand new MSN Live Hotmail was released to the public yesterday. A DigitalPoint Forums thread highlights the launch and links to the TechCrunch coverage of the release, which includes screenshots of the AJAX interface. However, there is also a non-AJAX interface for people like me.

I've been using the new non-AJAX version of MSN Live Hotmail for a long time and I personally think that it's a lot more robust and cleaner looking than the previous version. Additionally, you can even choose a color scheme (I chose black). There are a few small things that I would suggest that could make Hotmail and even better beast, but I'm happy. I'm not alone either:

Nice to hear that. It's a good news for us who are using the service!

One of the more welcoming features of the new Hotmail is the search bar on the top of screen, which gives you the ability to search within your email and perform a web search using live.com:

I remember when this was in beta and wasn't working right. It works fine now. :)

Forum discussion continues at DigitialPoint Forums.

The official Microsoft adCenter representative has confirmed that they are using Intellitxt ads "to drive trial and interest in Live Search itself."

Intellitxt is a contextual product that shows ads within the text you are reading for the those keywords in the content.

The thing is, they are driving search queries to their search engine, via the contextual networks.

Imagine you are reading a web site on sports, you then hover over a link that reads "sports" which takes you to a search query on "sports" at Live.com. Then your ad targeted for the keyword "sports" is displayed on Live.com. Is that the type of traffic you want?

Advertiser, Mel, said no:

Here's my issue with this campaign: we've found that visitors coming from this type of advertising tend to behave more like content network visitors than search visitors. In other words, they ran across the ad while reading an article on a content site, and are just idly browsing -- they're not in "buy" mode like someone who purposefully went to a search engine such as Live.com and typed in a query. And these visitors convert about the same (for us, anyway) as content visitors.

However, the ad they were clicking on in this case was our search ad, with bids based on search economics. All of a sudden, our ROI on that keyword plummeted as a result. If these were content ads, I'd have been fine with it, because I'd have set my bids accordingly.

Mel wants a way to opt out.

We know Ask.com has marketed on Google and other engines to drive traffic to their search engine in the past. Here are two examples. I am not sure if Ask.com using the contextual network to advertiser, so the user intent is a bit different.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The big news this morning is that Microsoft is looking to acquire Yahoo for $50 billion. Over at Search Engine Land, Danny also covers the possible merger.

Ironically, DigitalPoint members are hoping that this ends the the Google search monopoly:

Thats a good news.. Thats another way to remove Google's monopoly..

But on WebmasterWorld, they think that Google will only get ahead:

great news for google

What about rankings? Whose search engine will take over?

I think the deal would be bad, some of us rank good in one search engine, and poorly in the other

That's a really good point.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint.

I hate to say I told you so, but in this case, I told you so. Tamar reported on Monday, Microsoft adCenter Using Matching Criteria Other than Keyword Searches to Display Ads. In that, she explained how the terms and conditions are now updated to be more abstract. In the forums, there was a lot of confusion as to why.

I gave Tamar a quote, from myself, with my thoughts behind it saying:

This is not the first time Microsoft automatically added their advertisers to the content network program without their consent. When Microsoft launched their content network they did so by switching their advertisers into the program and then requiring them to opt out after the fact. In this case, I believe it may be similar, in that Microsoft wants to cover themselves by saying they "may" display their ads in other areas and via non-keyword searches (hence the content network and possibly via behavioral targeting methods).

Basically, I thought it was directly related to Microsoft wanting to boost up their content network and make sure they cover themselves on the legal side from their advertisers.

adCenter411, the adCenter representative in the forums, explained that the new text in the terms and conditions "allows you to participate in current and future adCenter services, such as Content Ads." The representative goes on to explain;

As we develop and launch new products, you may need to modify your adCenter account to adjust your participation to your desired level (i.e. turn-off participation, modify bids, etc.). We intend to keep you informed about new ad products or services and any significant changes to your service. For example, as we continue to offer our Content Ads product to new participants, we will email advertisers in advance to notify them about how they may turn-off content advertising.

So at first, content Ads. What can be next? Ads in Microsoft applications, ads in Xbox games, and so on. This keeps things open for Microsoft's online ad strategy. What is that strategy? Well, I recommend ready Keynote Conversation with Steve Berkowitz from last month.

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread tells the perfect story of someone who wants a page they own to be removed from the search engines.

One of my clients is an attorney and all of his partners have their own biography page on his website. One of the partners just left the firm and I removed her file from the server.

Now when her name shows up in the SE's, it's linked to a 404 error page I created, "Page cannot be found..."

My client doesn't want her name showing up at all in the SE's with a link to his website, even if it's to an error page.

With Google or Yahoo, there are ways to expedite the removal of the cache page and URL from the search engine. Recently, Google announced a new way to remove content from Google. You basically login to your verified Google Webmaster Central account and use the remove page tool. Yahoo also has a delete URL feature that allows verified site owners to remove URLs from their search index.

But the problem here is that this specific client, in the example above, wants the page removed from MSN Search. Microsoft has not given us a way to expedite the removal of a page or the cache results. Nor has Ask.com.

So what can a person do?

Softplus in the forums offers some suggestions:

(1) 404 the page, but that may take a pretty long time to impact the search results.
(2) Just change the content of that page and the next time Mr. Spider comes to crawl the page, the cache will be updated and the content you want removed will be gone.
(3) 301 the page to a different but related page.

Here are some other ideas:
- Block the page using a robots.txt command
- Add the nocache tag to the page

I personally think option two might be the quickest method outside of using a tool to remove the page, which is not offered by Microsoft of Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Great news from yesterday at SES. Danny has a great roundup describing that Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery at Search Engine Land and I have some more details with my coverage of the Sitemaps & URL Submission session from yesterday.

In short, all four major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and Ask.com will all support an autodiscovery method for Sitemaps. Sitemaps is an XML protocol that enables you to freely submit a listing of URLs with more meta-data to the search engines, so that the engines can be assisted in their crawl process. It is like a form of paid inclusion without paying.

Sitemaps was first introduced in November 2006 but back then you had to manually go to Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer and inform them about your sitemap. Now, all you need to do is put a little marker in your robots.txt file, telling the search engines the location of your sitemap and presto, the search engines will find it on their own.

Microsoft and Ask.com both promised to support it, but I believe are currently not supporting it yet.

More details on these bot sitemaps (not human sitemaps) at sitemaps.org.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread points out that MSN Search was unavailable briefly during the morning. A user reports:

Just tried Msn and yes search is not working. They might be changeing site but seems like some other problem. Msn is not showing up and site that is suppose to show up by url does not either.

Others saw different messages:

Yes, "problem loading page"

I get, "Server is too Busy"

I just tested MSN Live Search and it does seem to be working today.

Did you notice the downtime? Discuss at Dig