Below is live coverage of the Whats New at Bing and Blekko? panel from the PubCon 2011 conference.
Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.
Stay tuned! Live updates will begin momentarily.
4:24:45 PM Barry Schwartz: Starting soon, ignore that first image.
4:25:04 PM Barry Schwartz: We are going to start late because the timing of the sessions overlap again
4:26:18 PM Barry Schwartz: Blekko looks a bit stressed?
4:26:50 PM Barry Schwartz: No Google on this panel - nothing personal
4:29:13 PM Barry Schwartz: Still waiting...
4:31:08 PM Barry Schwartz: Here we go, first up is Rich
4:31:28 PM Brian Ussery: Rich is the founder and CEO of Blekko
4:31:44 PM Barry Schwartz: Why do a search engine? Blekko is delivering a different editorial choice
4:31:57 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko is to offer a different editorial choice, which is good for consumer
4:32:08 PM Brian Ussery: Search is editoral
4:32:47 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko wants to place humans into the mix. Steve Balmer said engines return the same results.
4:33:25 PM
Brian Ussery:
Blekko goals:
- spam free
- transparent
- human curated
- quality
- authoritave services
4:33:50 PM Brian Ussery: Algorithms - people = better search
4:34:13 PM Brian Ussery: curated search - no spam high quality
4:34:29 PM Barry Schwartz: The results are "perfect" he said
4:34:31 PM Brian Ussery: Most of the web is junk!
4:34:59 PM Brian Ussery: You don't need 50,000 chicken recipes they need 3 good ones.
4:36:36 PM Brian Ussery: spam is sometimes in the ey of the beholder. No junk mail only pizza vouchers
4:36:42 PM Barry Schwartz: Blekko uses auto boost
4:37:02 PM Barry Schwartz: They want to do this with 1,000 categories, up from 110
4:37:06 PM Brian Ussery: blekko has autoboost categories with 110 tags
4:37:10 PM Barry Schwartz: It works!
4:37:24 PM Barry Schwartz: slashtags clean up the web
4:37:39 PM Brian Ussery: For english queries when blekko applied slash tags 80% choose blekko results.
4:37:52 PM Barry Schwartz: Partnership with stackoverflow and even with sports sites
4:38:02 PM Brian Ussery: blekko uses stack overflow experts to vet results
4:38:20 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko offers open free seo data
4:38:51 PM Barry Schwartz: They have a grep tool for the web
4:39:01 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko offers Grep the web and vote for Greps.
4:39:12 PM Barry Schwartz: This is their growth
4:39:57 PM Barry Schwartz: Yandex provided half of their funding
4:40:18 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko has had growth over the past year. Blekko just raised 30 million dollars. Yandex provided half Blekko's funding. Yandex is the Google of Russia.
4:40:30 PM Brian Ussery: Thanks Rich
4:40:32 PM Barry Schwartz: That is all from Blekko
4:40:40 PM Barry Schwartz: Duana from Bing is now up
4:40:54 PM Brian Ussery: Now Duane Forrester Sr Product Mgr Bing / Microsoft
4:40:59 PM Barry Schwartz: Look at that mustache
4:41:35 PM Barry Schwartz: He explains the fuzzy lip for "Movember"
4:42:20 PM Brian Ussery: Duane's talk is titled The Zen of Search. Duane says he and Matt Cutts from Google are growing stashes for cancer #seostash.
4:42:20 PM Ani Lopez: Right Brian: don't need 50,000 chicken recipes they need 3 good ones but paella recipes first 10 results suck in all search engines :)
4:42:51 PM Brian Ussery: @duaneforrester is how to make Bing Webmaster Tools better.
4:43:27 PM
Brian Ussery:
Bing Webmaster Tools rolled out expanding crawl details last week.
4:43:35 PM Barry Schwartz: Major Bing WMT update http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/11/03/bing-webmaster-tools-fall-updates.aspx
4:44:16 PM Brian Ussery: Bing shows malware alerts and emails you at any account you want.
4:44:45 PM Brian Ussery: Malware may be at any site including feeds from other sites for example.
4:45:32 PM Brian Ussery: Bing's job is to protect the user. For that reason any content on your site may trigger alert from 3rd party content.
4:45:51 PM Brian Ussery: Bing will not tell you what other site is infected.
4:46:41 PM Brian Ussery: URL Normalization, Bing allows 50 parameters for normalizing.
4:46:48 PM Barry Schwartz: They may even go larger than 50 parameters
4:47:26 PM Brian Ussery: Deeper Data and Index explorer, Duane love folks for using Bing Webmaster Tools.
4:48:16 PM
Brian Ussery:
Bing provides results for Yahoo and tools like deeper index explorer includes Yahoo data and numbers are not rounded.
4:48:37 PM Brian Ussery: DNS verify is good when code can't be changed easily.
4:49:05 PM Brian Ussery: Bing Webmaster Tools now has Microsoft Advertising data!
4:49:54 PM Brian Ussery: This show avg cost per click, good for organic folks trying to increase tracking. Owning paid and organic increases trust with searcher....
4:50:39 PM
Brian Ussery:
signals:
title
meta description
content
inbound links
social signals
retweet
#offollowers
likes
4:51:26 PM Brian Ussery: Bing values content most, social second, user experience third, link building foruth, seo last.
4:51:56 PM Brian Ussery: Importance is relative.
4:52:48 PM
Brian Ussery:
Top 5 seo investment:
crawlability
site structure
hierarchy
on page
link building
4:53:30 PM
Brian Ussery:
Search and social:
Quality
Trust
Popularity
Timeliness
4:55:41 PM Brian Ussery: Most people 80% will postpone purchase decision before consulting friend.
4:56:22 PM Brian Ussery: By integrating social aspects, conversion is faster.
4:57:29 PM Barry Schwartz: That is all from Duane
4:57:32 PM Barry Schwartz: Q&A Time
4:57:38 PM Brian Ussery: The same thought process for building your site can be used in social. Social impacts search now and in the future.
4:58:48 PM Brian Ussery: Q&A How does bing define bounce? DF says sliding scale not defined, the answer is what does the norm look like?
5:01:17 PM Barry Schwartz: If someone clicks back within a second and then goes to the second result and stays there, that is a signal to them...
5:01:39 PM Brian Ussery: DF says not to confuse bounce rate with dwell time. DF seems to be saying that bounce rate isn't important. When users hit back button and go to another site and then engage that is the important signal for the site where the user left.
5:02:48 PM Barry Schwartz: Links in 2000 were a social signal. Now we have more ways of sharing and voting.
5:03:18 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko, most links aren't made by people but they are in Twitter or Facebook.
5:04:11 PM Barry Schwartz: Bing: "Get active on social, there is a reason we have a partnership with facebook." Part of the reasons "other search engines don't mention it is because they don't have that partnership."
5:04:28 PM Barry Schwartz: Will Bing incorporate Google + as another signal?
5:04:59 PM Barry Schwartz: Duane said "are you kidding" in response to at the same level of Facebook. It is currently not on any roadmap there but it would be interesting.
5:05:17 PM Barry Schwartz: He wouldn't be surprised if they do address it in the future.
5:06:19 PM Barry Schwartz: ALL your links are reported in Bing Webmaster Tools, not some like Google
5:06:34 PM Barry Schwartz: But the competitive link tool from Yahoo Site Explorer is going away
5:06:39 PM Brian Ussery: Is Bing Webmaster Tools full data or part? ANS full. Bonus, Yahoo site explorer data is in Bing Webmaster Tools.
5:07:24 PM Brian Ussery: Blekko will bring back duplicate tool features.
5:07:43 PM Barry Schwartz: Will Bing use authorship for qualifying authors?
5:08:12 PM Barry Schwartz: Bing is not aware of using rel author - but they have schema.org
5:08:30 PM Barry Schwartz: As more people adopt these things, they can always add it if it becomes valuable.
5:10:32 PM Barry Schwartz: Social media can be spammed but high quality content cannot be gamed, someone said.
5:10:58 PM Barry Schwartz: Would any of you phase out links in importance and actual content would become king?
5:12:13 PM Barry Schwartz: Blekko, good point... Is there something about a specific content that makes it high quality. Someone who writes something at the NY Times is more valuable even if the content is written at a no name blog --- the NY Times provides more credibility, even if the content is the same on a no name blog.
5:12:46 PM Barry Schwartz: eHow looks great, but the content is not good. You should not get anything from that site.
5:12:56 PM Barry Schwartz: Bing: Links are not going away anytime soon.
5:13:13 PM Barry Schwartz: Social sharing is good for links but you don't get good anchor text from social sharing.
5:13:39 PM Barry Schwartz: Source trust is important, not just about the content itself.
5:14:28 PM Brian Ussery: "Like farms" are starting to replace link farms according to Bing.
5:15:31 PM
Barry Schwartz:
The Yahoo Bing relationship is great!
All
5:15:33 PM Barry Schwartz: All done!
5:15:38 PM
Barry Schwartz:
See you next year!