Entries from Search Engine Roundtable tagged with 'bing'

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,...

Posted on October 30, 2009 9:09 AM

A new Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta application is reportedly coming this November 6th. Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta allows adCenter advertisers (ads on Bing) to manage their ads via a desktop application, as opposed to the web console. A WebmasterWorld thread...

Posted on October 30, 2009 8:52 AM

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...

Posted on October 27, 2009 9:32 AM

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...

Posted on October 23, 2009 8:20 AM

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...

Posted on October 22, 2009 8:27 AM

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...

Posted on October 20, 2009 9:01 AM

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...

Posted on October 15, 2009 8:20 AM

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...

Posted on October 14, 2009 8:20 AM

Today is Columbus Day, and the only search engine to have a special logo or theme up today is Microsoft's Bing. Here is a picture of Bing today, with one "hot spot" highlighted: Pretty neat theme, background and hot spots....

Posted on October 12, 2009 9:15 AM

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...

Posted on October 12, 2009 9:05 AM

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....

Posted on October 1, 2009 8:18 AM

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...

Posted on September 29, 2009 9:07 AM

Yesterday I wrote about a MediaPost report claiming Microsoft Bing will be the next search engine to try favicons and images in search ads. Google tested favicons in AdWords and so did Yahoo search ads. Google Japan even went large...

Posted on September 22, 2009 8:21 AM

Today, in some parts of the world, is the first day of Autumn. Yes, summer is officially over. Bing is the only major search engine to have an image up for the day. Although Google had season logos in the...

Posted on September 22, 2009 8:08 AM

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...

Posted on September 18, 2009 5:19 AM

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,...

Posted on September 18, 2009 5:14 AM

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....

Posted on September 17, 2009 8:31 AM

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...

Posted on September 16, 2009 8:18 AM

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...

Posted on September 16, 2009 8:05 AM

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:...

Posted on September 15, 2009 8:31 AM

Today is the anniversary of the horrible attacks of the U.S., forever known as September 11th, or 9/11. People will be asking, why doesn't Google have a special logo up (a Doodle) to remember the day. The answer is because...

Posted on September 11, 2009 8:46 AM

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...

Posted on September 10, 2009 8:08 AM

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...

Posted on September 9, 2009 8:45 AM

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...

Posted on September 3, 2009 8:54 AM

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...

Posted on September 2, 2009 8:47 AM

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...

Posted on September 1, 2009 8:30 AM

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...

Posted on August 31, 2009 8:20 AM

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...

Posted on August 31, 2009 7:58 AM

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...

Posted on August 25, 2009 8:06 AM

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...

Posted on August 21, 2009 8:44 AM

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...

Posted on August 20, 2009 8:31 AM

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...

Posted on August 19, 2009 8:58 AM

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...

Posted on August 17, 2009 8:43 AM

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...

Posted on August 14, 2009 8:28 AM

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...

Posted on August 13, 2009 8:14 AM

I spotted a thread at the Bing Forums where an official Microsoft representative, "cashbackGreg," offered some insight into new features that may be coming to the Bing Cashback program. Bing's Cashback program gives you a way to get cash back...

Posted on August 12, 2009 8:28 AM

The Microsoft & Yahoo deal has been perceived as a very poor deal for Yahoo and has made Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, look extremely bad on Wall Street and in our community here. There is no doubt that Yahoo...

Posted on August 10, 2009 8:46 AM

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....

Posted on August 10, 2009 8:30 AM

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...

Posted on August 6, 2009 8:41 AM

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...

Posted on August 5, 2009 8:45 AM

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...

Posted on August 4, 2009 8:50 AM

A Reuters article reports Yahoo is still going to invest in search, at least until the Microsoft deal is done. Specifically, in real-time search by "mining" Twitter data. Let me quote a piece of this article: Yahoo's Prabhakar Raghavan, head...

Posted on August 3, 2009 8:39 AM

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...

Posted on August 3, 2009 8:19 AM

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)....

Posted on July 30, 2009 10:25 AM

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....

Posted on July 29, 2009 9:21 AM

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...

Posted on July 29, 2009 8:53 AM

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...

Posted on July 28, 2009 9:05 AM

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...

Posted on July 28, 2009 8:50 AM

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...

Posted on July 27, 2009 8:21 AM

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...

Posted on July 24, 2009 7:57 AM

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...

Posted on July 21, 2009 8:45 AM

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...

Posted on July 20, 2009 8:54 AM

40 years-ago today, on July 20, 1969, the United States's Apollo 11 mission, successfully landed a man on the moon. Some search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing and Google's YouTube have special logos for the day. Surprisingly, Google, Yahoo and...

Posted on July 20, 2009 8:23 AM

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,...

Posted on July 13, 2009 8:49 AM

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...

Posted on July 10, 2009 8:53 AM

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...

Posted on July 9, 2009 9:06 AM

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...

Posted on July 9, 2009 8:23 AM

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...

Posted on July 8, 2009 8:42 AM

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...

Posted on July 7, 2009 8:08 AM

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,...

Posted on July 2, 2009 8:50 AM

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...

Posted on June 30, 2009 8:49 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a search advertiser receiving an email from Microsoft's adCenter team about his ads not showing up in Bing. The email basically said that his site was reviewed by the QBR (Quality Based Ranking) team and they...

Posted on June 29, 2009 9:11 AM

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...

Posted on June 29, 2009 8:44 AM

Even though I kind of mocked Bing's spam tests as being the cause for many people seeing the search share of Microsoft's Bing as seizing market share, it is not the case in most situations. In most situations, the search...

Posted on June 26, 2009 8:33 AM

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...

Posted on June 25, 2009 8:23 AM

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...

Posted on June 19, 2009 7:31 AM

The NY Post, in NY Post style, went with an over the top title for their latest article about Google, which read Fear Grips Google. Here is the introductory paragraph: You'd think nothing would get under the skin of search...

Posted on June 15, 2009 8:37 AM

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...

Posted on June 15, 2009 8:16 AM

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...

Posted on June 9, 2009 8:58 AM

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...

Posted on June 8, 2009 8:32 AM

A week later, Google added Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, to Google Analytics. Last week we reported that webmasters were frustrated that Bing was not available in the search engine referral reports within the free Google Analytics immediately. It seems...

Posted on June 8, 2009 7:59 AM

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...

Posted on June 4, 2009 9:36 AM

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...

Posted on June 2, 2009 12:41 PM

Bing launched a couple days early, yesterday morning and Google Analytics users are confused as to why it does not show up in the search engine reports. The day Google released Chrome, their new browser, Google Analytics supported the new...

Posted on June 2, 2009 8:51 AM

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...

Posted on June 2, 2009 8:32 AM

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...

Posted on June 1, 2009 8:47 AM

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...

Posted on May 20, 2009 9:00 AM