Entries from Search Engine Roundtable tagged with 'live search'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Posted on May 4, 2009 8:56 AM

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...

Posted on April 29, 2009 8:17 AM

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...

Posted on April 24, 2009 8:46 AM

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...

Posted on April 22, 2009 8:39 AM

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...

Posted on March 18, 2009 8:47 AM

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....

Posted on March 4, 2009 8:08 AM

A common but difficult question was asked at HighRanking Forums about the issue of targeting different countries. My advice for when it comes to targeting different countries is almost always to have two different sites on TLDs (top level domains)...

Posted on February 11, 2009 9:28 AM

A HighRankings Forum thread has a very interesting topic just getting started. The thread creator asks, "What Has Changed In Seo In Last 2 Years?" This is a great question. People think that SEO tactics are always changing. You need...

Posted on February 3, 2009 8:41 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks for tips on how he can get his site indexed and crawled faster by Google. The thing is, most, if not all, of these tips apply not to just Google, but any search engine, such as...

Posted on January 7, 2009 8:57 AM

Brent Csutoras published results of his Microsoft ContentAds test by accident. I wasn't able to see all the results because he pulled them after being notified that he is not allowed to share any stats because he is in a...

Posted on January 2, 2009 8:31 AM

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...

Posted on January 2, 2009 7:49 AM

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...

Posted on December 15, 2008 7:43 AM

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...

Posted on November 28, 2008 7:11 AM

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....

Posted on November 25, 2008 4:16 PM

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...

Posted on November 25, 2008 10:33 AM

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...

Posted on November 24, 2008 7:42 AM

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,...

Posted on October 23, 2008 8:25 AM

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...

Posted on October 10, 2008 9:41 AM

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...

Posted on October 3, 2008 8:34 AM

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...

Posted on September 17, 2008 8:28 AM

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...

Posted on August 8, 2008 8:26 AM

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...

Posted on July 31, 2008 10:38 AM

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....

Posted on July 24, 2008 9:51 AM

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...

Posted on July 24, 2008 8:11 AM

Since the tide seems to be shifting and more and more advertisers are opting for Microsoft adCenter over Yahoo Search Marketing, I thought I share with you a recent adCenter related thread from WebmasterWorld. Let's say you wanted to track...

Posted on July 17, 2008 8:39 AM

First there was Goto.com (aka Overture.com) as the leader in PPC by advertiser spend. Then Google outpaced Overture. Overture was bought by Yahoo and Yahoo's Overture (now Panama) secured the second place in advertiser spend. Well, now, it seems like...

Posted on July 9, 2008 7:57 AM

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...

Posted on July 8, 2008 7:30 AM

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...

Posted on April 24, 2008 7:49 AM

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...

Posted on April 15, 2008 7:39 AM

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...

Posted on March 28, 2008 8:36 AM

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...

Posted on March 25, 2008 7:25 AM

comScore released February 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings which showed that month-to-month, search volume was down about 6-percent from January 2008 to February 2008. Here are the stats on that by engine: At the same time, Google gained slightly more...

Posted on March 20, 2008 7:51 AM

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...

Posted on March 11, 2008 6:59 AM

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...

Posted on February 25, 2008 7:18 AM

Many of you probably already know that Microsoft's Live Search has been displaying "Sitelinks" under the first search result for some queries for a while now. In fact, they have been doing this since the Microsoft Searchification Day 2007 in...

Posted on February 20, 2008 7:42 AM

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...

Posted on February 18, 2008 7:28 AM

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...

Posted on February 13, 2008 7:28 AM

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...

Posted on February 6, 2008 4:00 AM

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...

Posted on January 18, 2008 9:09 AM

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...

Posted on January 17, 2008 7:31 AM

I noticed an update to the WebmasterWorld thread with the discussion of the weird referrals in the form of spam-like referrals coming from Live Search as cloaking tests. It appears a webmaster is now noticing a bot named MSLIVSOP serving...

Posted on January 14, 2008 7:27 AM

I wish Loren at Search Engine Journal also had a category for Best Search Video Blog and Best Search Podcast, because I would have voted for WebProNew's Video Blog for that one. In Mike McDonalds latest video blog interview, he...

Posted on January 9, 2008 8:09 AM

A Google Groups thread asks if Google indexes and ranks Apple .Mac pages. Basically, .Mac is just a hosting service for Mac users, who pay for a "Dot Mac" subscription. Googler, JohnMu, said Google does index and rank .Mac files....

Posted on December 26, 2007 7:46 AM

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

Posted on December 20, 2007 9:42 AM

In early November I reported that Microsoft's link command came back to life. But it now seems to be up and down, currently down. The new link command that should work, is the the syntax of +linkdomain:www.seroundtable.com. But as expected,...

Posted on December 19, 2007 7:25 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Microsoft's Live Search automatically regionalizing the search results of Live.com when searches are conducted in Australia. Woz, WebmasterWorld moderator, said Live is "automatically serving results focused towards," plus they have added "an "Australia Only" tick box."...

Posted on December 7, 2007 7:32 AM

Yesterday we reported that MSNBot failed some reverse DNS tests. In short, if you did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP addresses of their spiders, it would not resolve to search.live.com. The big issue with this is that Webmasters...

Posted on December 6, 2007 7:20 AM

Microsoft announced a new feature that advertisers can use make their search marketing ad management easier with Microsoft adCenter. The tool is an adCenter add-in for Excel. It will allow you to: Easily extract keywords from any website, just by...

Posted on December 6, 2007 7:14 AM

A year ago, Microsoft promised to enable Webmasters a method of verifying MSNbot. Way too often, rogue spiders mask themselves as official spiders from Google, Yahoo, Live Search or Ask.com. The search engines have enabled methods to conduct reverse DNS...

Posted on December 5, 2007 7:22 AM

I have been corresponding with Microsoft about the weird spam-like referrals Live Search was sending to hundreds, if not thousands, of web site log files throughout the web. On September 6th, a Microsoft representative confirmed that these were actual tests...

Posted on December 4, 2007 3:00 PM

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

Posted on December 3, 2007 9:38 AM

How would you go about submitting a reinclusion request for a site that may have been banned from MSN unfairly? MSNdude says that you can visit http://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlsearch&ct=eformts and ask for reinclusion. Forum members at WebmasterWorld are frankly disappointed in MSN's...

Posted on November 26, 2007 7:41 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread has a great run down of the frustration many search marketers have to deal with when it comes to advertising with Microsoft adCenter. The user interface within the advertising console clearly frustrates most search marketers. They say...

Posted on November 20, 2007 7:30 AM

In September, we reported that Microsoft's Live Search spam-like referrals are official tests performed by Microsoft and that blocking them could have you delisted from the search results. A bunch of forum members are still reporting this "abnormal" activity and...

Posted on November 19, 2007 10:20 AM

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

Posted on November 15, 2007 7:27 AM

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

Posted on November 14, 2007 7:13 AM

A Sphinn and WebmasterWorld thread report that you can now use the link commands at Live.com again. The syntax appears to be slightly different as Karen Blakeman notes. For a link command, you need to use +link:www.domain.com/filename and for a...

Posted on November 12, 2007 12:22 PM

digg_url = 'http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015268.html'; I just got my invite to Microsoft's new Live Search Webmaster Portal. It is currently in a private beta, so I am not even sure if I can blog this, but I read all the privacy...

Posted on November 7, 2007 1:45 PM

After almost one month of the Live Search URL Submission form being down, it is now back up at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. On October 9th, a WebmasterWorld thread reported the form was down, and it remained down until msnDude saw a different...

Posted on November 6, 2007 7:18 AM

Microsoft announced that they will be launching the Live Search Webmaster Portal, similar to Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central. Microsoft started inviting webmasters into the beta starting around August 31st of this year. I have not heard of...

Posted on November 1, 2007 7:04 AM

As expected early last week, Microsoft announced the "New Live Search". Todd, Oilman, posted live coverage, as did Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land of the Searchification event at Microsoft. Here is what Microsoft explained is new: Relevance, relevance, relevance. ...

Posted on October 1, 2007 8:12 AM

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

Posted on September 25, 2007 7:32 AM

TexTex reports at a WebmasterWorld thread about an algorithm and design update at Live.com. No one else saw what Tex saw. Tex described it as: It was a totally different index...with a different look aesthetically..it has since disappeared. Although no...

Posted on September 21, 2007 7:17 AM

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

Posted on September 6, 2007 7:52 AM

Seems like Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft Live Search all are not sporting anything exciting or new for Labor Day. They have not done anything special in the past either, so it is not too surprising. Dogpile is sporting the...

Posted on September 3, 2007 8:55 AM

A couple weeks ago Microsoft Promised Webmasters a Live Search Portal. Part of that included the ability to be part of the beta, to test out new features. Some Webmasters signed up and have already been invited into the beta....

Posted on September 3, 2007 8:41 AM

Many are excited that Microsoft has announced that they will be building out a webmaster portal. The portal will be similar to that of Yahoo's Site Explorer of Google's Webmaster Central. As Danny Sullivan explains, the portal will help consolidate...

Posted on August 24, 2007 6:10 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread reports several webmasters finding weird referrers from Microsoft's Live Search. I am getting thousands of hits where the items in my log show the referrer as follows; http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=KEYWORD&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP When I load the referred page then I am...

Posted on August 17, 2007 7:36 AM

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

Posted on July 25, 2007 7:54 AM