Microsoft MSN Search Archives

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

Here is what WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster wrote:

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

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

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

The last Bing update we reported was in late October.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear ***,

Thank you for your participation in the Bing cashback program.

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

As per Section 12 of the Bing cashback Merchant Agreement:

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

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

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

Current:

Preview:

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

Here is a picture from today:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So three webmaster points here:

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

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Forums.

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

Here is the break down:

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This shouldn't confuse anyone down the road.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

Two recent examples for you:

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forum and Google Webmaster Help.

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

Here is a video demo of how it works:

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the problem is back in another shape!

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

Now that would be a neat feature.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

Brett said:

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

So I am a bit upset with Bing Webmaster support.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continued at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

Why is the msn bot clicking our paid text ads?

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Creative idea indeed, nice to see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Was a bit embarrasing to say the least!

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, HighRankings Forum & Bing Community.

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

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

Brett said:

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two things I find interesting in this thread.

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

That includes features such as:

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

Bing shows 3:55pm:

Yahoo also shows 3:55pm:

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

I hope so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Community.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

Question: Do You Like The Bing Commercials?

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

Other answers include:

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

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

Here is the chart people are showing:

Here is the full PDF of the study:

Catalyst Group Bing V. Google Usability Study -

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Here is the poll, please take it:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the other answers:

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

Forum discussion continued at:

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

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

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

Google Tetris Doodle on June 6, 2009:

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at several forums:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is one post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Forum discussion:

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Hopefully it will get resolved soon and forever.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Three main things:

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

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

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

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

JohnMu said in a forum post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The email looked like this:

Hello, Barry!

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

From your recent purchases, you have earned cashback savings!

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

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



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

Thanks,
The Live Search cashback team

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

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

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

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

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

Brett welcomes everyone and does some quick house keeping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satya Nadella is now back up.

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

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

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

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

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

Project Silk Road - Services for Developers and Publishers:

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

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

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

Alexandra Mickel is back on stage to demo:

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

Satya Nadella is now back up.

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

Overall they are excited about the progress they have made.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and High Rankings Forums.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Sphinn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

Here is a screen capture:

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

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

But I guess not everyone will feel that way.

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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