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108 items tagged "MSN"

Microsoft adCenter Reports Impressions Drop Bug?

Posted: October 29th, 2010, 3:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

There are two threads on the topic of a possible bug with Microsoft adCenter. It seems like some advertisers are reporting seeing a major drop in the impression reports displayed for their search ads. A Microsoft Advertising Forum thread and a WebmasterWorld thread have reports from two advertisers.

Here is one report:

In the last few days several of our adcenter accounts have suddenly stopped generating spend. These are accounts with hundreds of adgroups and thousands of keywords. It's a sudden issue, but I suspect its somehow related to the migration. My reps have said they have other clients facing similar issues, but I can't find anything on the forums about it.
My server logs show short bursts of traffic for maybe an hour in the early morning and then not a single impression the rest of the day. Bids are not the issue, as I've tested raising some bids to 400% of their current levels and the ads still aren't showing.

In the Microsoft Advertising Forum thread, a Microsoft representative did reply telling the person to call in. The person did and was given information stating this is a bug, but the forum rep said it likely isn't a bug. Let me quote them.

Just got off the phone with a support engineer - this is a known system-side bug impacting a subset of advertisers. Starting this week, and occurring "randomly and intermittently", some accounts had their Ad Distribution setting set to "Not set", basically pausing all ad groups and campaigns in the account. This can be seen in the Medium column on the Ads tab. Unfortunately manually setting ad distribution to Search Network or other does not fix the problem. No known estimate to fix this...sigh...

Microsoft's forum representative replies:

There may be another reason as to why you are not receiving impressions or clicks in your account. When the Ad Distribution dispalys "Not Set" it means the distribution has not been determined as search or content yet because you have not received impressons in the adgroup. The Ad distribution in no way causes your adsto not show, there will be an underlying reason as to why this is occuring.
I understand our support team may have provided misguided information previously but I will have to recommend that you contact them again to have them look more in depth as to why your account is not performing.

So who is right? Microsoft or Microsoft? Oh wait?!

Of course this is a bigger issue now, cause Microsoft gobbled up Yahoo and now powers about 30% of the search ads in the US.

Forum discussion at Microsoft Advertising Forum thread and a WebmasterWorld .

Facebook Drop Down On Bing Search? Yep, It's Rolling Out

Posted: October 29th, 2010, 3:10pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A couple weeks ago, Bing partnered with Facebook to add a more social experience to the Bing search results. I covered the details of what is coming over here. Now, it seems to be rolling out slowly to Bing users.

If you are logged into Facebook and go to Bing.com and search for something, you may see a drop down on the right top corner stating:

Hi NAME, Bing just got better with your Facebook friends.

Here is a picture:

Yes, Facebook knows you are searching on Bing and Bing allows them to know. Again, you need to be logged into Facebook for this to work. And you can always disable it. Just click on disable or use this link to block the Bing App.

There are some people now seeing this live on Bing.com. I personally do not, but Jerry at the Search Engine Watch Forums said he now sees it. But he was a beat freaked out, I guess he didn't hear the announcement.

Jerry said, "How in the world did Bing get the right to snap up my profile and use it on their website?"

Anyway, it is here, do you see it?

For more on what it does to have Facebook with Bing, see DiscoverBing.com.

Forum discussion Search Engine Watch Forums.

Gobble Gobble: Microsoft Bing/adCenter Swallows Yahoo Completely In US & Canada

Posted: October 28th, 2010, 3:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

As you know, Yahoo was planning on migrating everyone in the US and Canada over from their search ad platform to Microsoft adCenter by the end of this month. As Yahoo said, mission accomplished, Yahoo has successful handed themselves over to Microsoft on a platter. Ironically, well before the Thanksgiving holiday, which was their goal. Gobble Gobble!

I summed up the news and what this means at Search Engine Land but I'll bullet point it here.

US/Canada organic and paid search on Yahoo now fully powered by Bing.
CPC prices will increase, as we have seen, on Microsoft adCenter due to increased competition
You will be able to access your Yahoo reports in read only mode for 5 months at Yahoo
Historical data will remain for 13-months
Those spending a nice amount still will have their Yahoo reps, everyone else gets managed by Microsoft
Mobile ads will be migrated by the end of this month, which is now

Those are the key points.

I do have to commend Yahoo and Microsoft for completing this transition smoothly and well before the major holiday shopping season. But as you all know, I am still bitter about the whole deal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Gets Something Google Can't Get, Facebook Data

Posted: October 14th, 2010, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

The huge search news yesterday was Bing's Facebook announcement. In short, Bing is now showing you search results that your friends on Facebook like.

Let me be clear, the Bing organic search results are currently not changing based on your Facebook data. Instead, Bing is adding a module on the search page that shows results that your friends might like for the query. Got that?

Here is a sample of a module:

This alone is valuable. Personally, not to me, since I really don't use Facebook like I should. But so many people, not people who use Twitter (techies) but people like your mom and dad, sister and brother, use Facebook. This is incredibly valuable. Google would not deny this, heck they are trying to make a huge push in social search by using Twitter and other open social networks, but nothing comes close to what Facebook has and they are closed.

That being said, currently the organic results on Bing are not impacted by this. Will they be? Who knows, maybe in the future. But if it is, I wonder how that impacts the Yahoo results.

Recommended reading for this? Of course, Danny's article at Search Engine Land. Matt McGee notified me of Amit Kumar's post on this. Amit was at Yahoo before Yahoo "killed" SearchMonkey (Amit used those words and he built Search Monkey). He said this will give Bing more relevant results than Google within a year - I guess that is if they have it impact the pure organic results.

More coverage at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums.

Bing's Former Program Manager Now Giving SEO Advice In Bing Forums

Posted: October 12th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

As you know, Bing is revamping their webmaster communications and thus let go most of the personalities we have grown to love in the Bing support area.

One such personality was Brett Yount, former Bing's webmaster center program manager who spent a lot of his time bridging the communication between webmasters and Bing within the Bing forums.

Since his departure, about 8 weeks ago, he has been silent in the forums. But yesterday he came back to life offering SEO advice for Bing, as a non-Bing employee.

In a Bing Community thread, Brett replied to a thread saying:

Links matter- Period.
If the page is indexed and if it fits your quality guidelines, go after it.

Having many low quality links from NON-SPAM sites (think P1 here...new sites, etc.) will help some.

Having a few high quality links from high PR sites will help more.

The web is called the web because your site should connect to many other relevant sites that eventually combine to make a web pattern.

YOUR TOP PRIORITY - becoming that little space in the middle of the spider's web. When you reach that, when you have many concentric rings of domains pointing to your domain at the center, at that time you will become the authority in your web-sphere of influence.

It makes you wonder how much of the algorithm Brett still or ever knew and his deeper understanding of how to make results pop on Bing?

In any event, it is good to see Brett participating in SEO discussions as a non-search engine representative. We see the same with former Googler, Vanessa Fox and others.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Webmaster Center To Add Link Reports, Link Explorer & More

Posted: October 5th, 2010, 2:47pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

At SMX East yesterday, Bing had a sponsored panel named Bing Webmaster Tools and the Search Alliance which I live blogged. In that demo, they showed off some new features coming to the Bing Webmaster Center toolset.

In July they revamped their webmaster tools but dropped a key element, linkage reporting. Yesterday, Bing demoed the new link report. They also demoed a feature called link explorer that shows you what their spiders see on a link by link basis. You can even block URLs there and ask Bing to recrawl them as soon as possible.

None of these features are live yet, but I have some screen shots taken from slides via my iPhone. They are hard to make out, so I will try to explain them:

First report is an "InLinks" report. The report shows you links accrued over time and also let's you drill down into the links, which would be right below the graph:

Here are two picture of Index Explorer, which shows you more details about the URLs crawled and let's you request them to be crawled again sooner and blocked:

There is no forum discussion on this yet, but it is nice to see.

You may learn more from my live blog coverage of that session.

55% Say Yahoo/Microsoft Deal With Increase CPC Prices

Posted: September 30th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

About a week ago, I ran a poll asking if CPC prices will increase after the Yahoo/Microsoft search ad deal transitions over.

Most those who replied said yes. 55% of the 71 responses, yes, not our largest poll, said the prices of the keywords on a cost-per-click level will increase. 30% said the prices will remain about the same. Only 7% said the prices will decrease and 8.5% said they really don't know.

Here is the break down:

CPC Prices Will Increase: 55%
CPC Prices Will Remain About The Same: 30%
No Idea: 8.5%
CPC Prices Will Decrease : 7%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Note: This post was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live today.

BingBot Arrives: Microsoft's New Crawler

Posted: September 29th, 2010, 10:15pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

The folks over at WebmasterWorld have just started noticing Microsoft's new spider arriving. As expected, the new spider is named BingBot.

BingBot will still obey all the rules of its predecessor, MSNBot, but now has a fancy new name.

The original announcement said this would happen on October 1, 2010, so we are a day or two early. Here is one sample find in a webmaster's log files:

207.46.195.227 Tue Sep 28 20:24:15 2010 "GET /widgets.html HTTP/1.1" 200 4321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" Connection="Keep-Alive" Accept="*/*" Accept-Encoding="gzip, deflate"

As I said back then... Microsoft said that BingBot will continue to respect and honor the msnbot directives in the robots.txt file, so you do not need to update your robots.txt files yet. But if you are doing more advanced checking, you may need to update your personal scripts. It is also to note that if Microsoft "detect separate sets of directives for bingbot and for any of the older versions of Microsoft search bots (such as msnbot) or a set of directives for all crawlers, the directives for bingbot will take precedence."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Do You Like Bing's HTML5 Interface?

Posted: September 22nd, 2010, 3:53pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A week ago today, Bing announced their IE9 Bing search "experience." In reality you should now or soon be able to see the new Bing experience in other browsers that support HTML5, like Firefox, Chrome and Safari but Bing said it might only work in the beta of IE9.

Here is a video demo of the experience:

Do you like it?

Do You Like The Bing HTML5 Interface?online surveys

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Will CPC Prices Increase With Yahoo & Microsoft Search Ad Deal?

Posted: September 21st, 2010, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft are beginning to migrate Yahoo advertiser to adCenter, there are some concerns that the prices of a click will increase when all is set and done.

A WebmasterWorld thread points to a press release where GroupM Search said advertisers should see a 78% increase in cost-per-click prices. Why? "Increase competition."

My big question is, are the CPC prices on Google 78% higher than those on Yahoo or Microsoft?

Do you think prices will increase that much? Take my poll:

Will Microsoft/Yahoo Search Ad Deal Increase CPC?online surveys

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Revamping Webmaster Communication?

Posted: September 15th, 2010, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

For the past month, I have been wondering why Brett Yount, former Bing's webmaster center program manager hasn't made a post at the forums he manages at the Bing Forums.

I then spotted a tweet by way of BigMouthMedia that says Bing's blog editor Rick DeJarnette is no longer working at Bing/Microsoft. He wrote, "After 2 years, Bing has new plans for the webmaster blog, so it’s time to move on."

So I checked Brett Yount's signature in a post and noticed he updated it recently to read, "*I no longer work for Bing."

What is going on? What is Microsoft doing to the Bing webmaster communication? I am not sure if someone replaced either Brett or Rick yet. It is clear that Rick was fired, he tweeted that Microsoft wants "to change course."

BigMouthMedia speculates that the change is due to the integration of Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. That could be but honestly Yahoo was pretty bad at communication on the search side. At least over the past year, they were good years and years ago. Paid search side, Yahoo was and is still pretty good, but not on the organic search side.

I wonder what changes are brewing at Bing in terms of webmaster communication.

Forum discussion? Well, none really to point to sadly.

Bing Now #2 Search Engine, They Didn't Even Have To Take Over Yahoo

Posted: September 15th, 2010, 3:26pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Nielsen released a report showing that Bing, Microsoft's search engine, has finally surpassed Yahoo. That makes Bing the number two search engine, behind Google. Yahoo has taken the three position. This does not apparently include the fact that Bing is powering most of Yahoo Search queries.

A WebmasterWorld thread is very excited for Bing's success. One member said:

Good news. I'm pulling for Bing. Hopefully we get Google to adjust their attitude a bit which stinks lately.

I just find this funny being that Yahoo gave up on search by outsourcing the core search ranking algorithm and indexing to Bing and then Bing is eating their market share slowly and slowly. Plus, Bing is powering most of Yahoo's searches, so they get it on both ends. Good for Microsoft!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft Cloaking MSNBots Again?

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters complaining that Microsoft is cloaking their MSNBots again, soon to be named BingBot.

It has been going on recently since early August and continues throughout today.

Microsoft has had issues with cloaking their bots in the past and fixed them. Is it possible they are breaking into bad habits once again?

One senior member at WebmasterWorld said:

Currently, straight out of my logs...

65.52.33.73 - - [05/Aug/2010:15:45:09 -0700] "GET /dir/filename.html HTTP/1.1" 403 1468 "-" "-"

No UA, no robots.txt, no REF, no nothing. Not once. Not twice. Not even three times. Try eleven.

After about a month, one member said:

I cannot believe the lack of response to this thread.

Microsoft bot IP is compromised and being used by non-bot UAs, possibly even has been hacked, and NO response. Amazing.

So how about it Microsoft? What is the answer?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Web Search Update?

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 4:03pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

This is very very early and I don't have evidence of this myself, since I don't monitor rankings, but a single post at WebmasterWorld suggested there is a Bing update taking place.

textex, someone I trust at the forum, who has been a member of WebmasterWorld for almost ten years now, said:

Looks like an update....

So if there is a Bing update, there is a Yahoo update in the US and Canada.

Did you notice major changes in your Bing rankings?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reporting Search Spam To Bing

Posted: August 24th, 2010, 3:37pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Now that Bing owns about 30% of the U.S. market share by gobbling up Yahoo's search share, some people may want to know how to report search spam to Bing.

Now, we know most SEOs won't report competitors to spam. The topic of spam reporting is nothing new:

That being said, if you wanted to report serious spam that you are afraid your children or grandparents would be hurt by, then here is how.

Go to Bing.com and on the bottom right, there is a link for "Tell us what you think." Click it and select "Found Spam" in the drop down on the form. Fill it out and pray they do something.

The "Tell us what you think" is found on all the search result pages as well, so it is always in the bottom right hand corner of all the pages.

You can also try this form or the Bing Webmaster Forums.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & Bing Forums.

Bing News Sends Nice Traffic & Can Be Delayed

Posted: August 20th, 2010, 2:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

When it comes to news search engines, it seems like all we talk about is Google News and rarely Yahoo or Bing News.

I spotted a WebmasterWorld thread with a rare post by someone included in the Bing News index. The publisher said, "My site has just been indexed in Bing News. And I like it."

He said he didn't request to get listed in Bing News, which, by the way, doesn't work. He was just included randomly and he loves what he sees.

He noticed an "uptick in retweets" and looked into it. It turned out to be Bing sending traffic to his site via Bing News.

Yes, Bing is way more selective than Google News. He also said that some of his content gets pulled into Bing News on a two-day delay. I am not sure if that is specific to his site being newly indexed or just the way Bing handles "news," which kind of doesn't make sense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Shopping Now Free & Forums Open Up

Posted: August 3rd, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Brian Smith was the first that I know of to report that Bing Shopping is now free for merchants to sign up with and list their products.

Brian Smith runs SingleFeed, a shopping search engine merchant feed service, that does what the name promises.

As I mentioned in my Search Engine Land piece, Bing Shopping was fee based and they changed the page to say it was free. There is also a PDF with more details.

As you know, Bing's Cashback program discontinued on July 31st. Bing quietly, I still don't see an announcement, is allowing merchants to submit their products to Bing Shopping for free now. The merchant submission form is over here. Again, I am not sure why they are keeping this so hush hush or if I missed an announcement from them.

They do have a forum dedicated to Bing Shopping Help. Carolyn Miller from Microsoft said in one thread:

Welcome to the Bing Shopping forum!
This forum is designed for merchants wishing to collaborate on best practices and ideas for the Bing Shopping program.

Carolyn Miller

adCenter Community Team PM

Forum discussion at Bing Shopping Help.

Microsoft's Street Slide, A Preview

Posted: July 30th, 2010, 3:06pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

The online mapping products get cooler almost every day. The latest buzz is around Microsoft Street Slide, which is not live yet, but is currently being developed.

Here is a video that explains it better than I can in words:

There are more articles on this at Neowin, Google Maps Mania and Search Engine Land.

A Google Blogoscoped Forums thread points out some people are trying to do the same type of things on Google Maps via their API over here.

This is neat stuff.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search

Posted: July 29th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.

The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.

Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:

Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.

Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Launches New Webmaster Tools, Drops Link Reports

Posted: July 21st, 2010, 3:03pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

If you login to Bing Webmaster Tools you may notice a large change. The whole thing has been totally redone!

The Bing Webmaster Blog currently has no mention of it yet. There is a single person in the Bing Forums who noticed it, and so did @suzukik on Twitter.

The three most noticeable changes that you see right away include:

Microsot Silverlight is required to see any real data in Bing Webmaster Tools.
The reports look much slicker and controllable if you have Silverlight installed.
NO BACKLINK DATA, they removed the linkage reports completely.

I won't install Silverlight on my main machine, so there is no way I will personally be using this every day. Even more so, how can they remove the back link data? Maybe Yahoo Site Explorer will be replacing it? I hope so because right now, Bing is offering nothing.

Here are screen shots of the reports:

Home without Silverlight installed:

Overview without Silverlight installed:

Overview:

Dashboard:

Crawl Stats:

Index Stats:

Traffic Stats with Query Data:

Bing wrote a message to everyone who logs into Webmaster Tools, it reads:

Welcome to the new Bing Webmaster Tools. The site has been redesigned to be easier to use, with an intuitive design organized around three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and rich charting functionality, provide a comprehensive view into how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. We’ll continue to add to the Bing Webmaster Tools as we develop new features that empower you to make more informed decisions about your sites but we encourage you to send us your feedback, suggestions and questions to help determine how the site evolves. Check the Bing Webmaster Blog to stay updated on new features and developments.

Find answers to most of your questions in the help section, which includes links to a Getting Started guide and additional guides on topics such as: site ownership verification, Sitemaps, and the Bing index. If you still have questions, the Bing Webmaster Forums is a great resource for additional support.

Overall, I love the new look of the reports and how fluid they are. But like I said, two main killers for me. First is Silverlight and the second is no back link data.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Update: At 9am (EST), Bing posted their blog post on this at the Bing Webmaster Blog.

Bing Almost Doubles Search Share In a Year

Posted: July 12th, 2010, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Microsoft relaunched their search engine Bing on June 1, 2009, just over a year ago.

On June 1, 2009 Bing's market share, according to Hitwise was 5.25%. A year later, according to Hitwise it is 9.85% share. If you do the math, that is about 88% growth year-over-year, not too far under double growth!

Here are some of the latest stats from Hitwise:

Of course, growing share from 5% to 10% is nice, but it still shadows Google's share. In June 2009, Google had a share of 74.04%, June 2010 Google's share is 71.65, so that is a 3% decline.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Releases Advanced Query Guide: SEOs Take A Look

Posted: July 1st, 2010, 3:22pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Bing has released a section explained their advanced search operators that can be used on Bing.com. Here is a list of those explained operators:

altloc:
AND
contains:
define
domain:
feed:
filetype:
hasfeed:
imagesize:
inanchor:
inbody:
instreamset:
intitle:
ip:
keyword
language:
literalmeta:
loc:
location:
meta:
msite:
near:
noalter:
norelax:
NOT
OR
site:
url:
-
&
&&
(
)
:
[
]
|
||
"phrase”

Tedster in a WebmasterWorld thread explains the value of such operators:

Bing just published (and publicized) an extensive list of Advance Operators. What a look into their search technology this offers! For example, here's a description of the advanced operator norelax:

norelax: Only allow search word, phrase or word: in the constraint. Bing implements relaxcount for a 5+ word query by default; that is, the fifth word in a query and subsequent appears do not necessarily appear in results.

Example: cry for you lyrics norelax:September

Remarks The effect of the syntax in this example is to specify that all returned results must contain september. In the absence of the norelax: operator, since there are 5 words in the query, Bing would augment with a relaxcount=+1, that could return documents that do not contain september.

SEOs, enjoy!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

BingBot Is Coming, BingBot Is Coming: Bye MSNBot

Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:13pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

The Bing Blog announced that Microsoft is retiring MSNBot in place of BingBot on October 1, 2010.

So instead of MSNBot showing up in your log files, you should see BingBot in your log files. It should look something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Microsoft said that BingBot will continue to respect and honor the msnbot directives in the robots.txt file, so you do not need to update your robots.txt files yet. But if you are doing more advanced checking, you may need to update your personal scripts. It is also to note that if Microsoft "detect separate sets of directives for bingbot and for any of the older versions of Microsoft search bots (such as msnbot) or a set of directives for all crawlers, the directives for bingbot will take precedence."

WebmasterWorld's Bing moderator said, "So anyone herding msnbot using .htaccess or other means will need to start adjusting your software accordingly."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Upgrades Design & iPhone App & Pushes Entertainment

Posted: June 23rd, 2010, 2:50pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Microsoft announced their new look yesterday, with a big push in entertainment and also a revamped iPhone App.

Matt McGee has a pretty detailed look at the Bing design changes, Elisabeth Osmeloski took a look at the expanded entertainment features and dug into the Bing iPhone app changes at Search Engine Land.

I wanted to show you a search result from before and after. The before picture is from the end of March, so fairly recent:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Things seem more tightened up and cleaner. Overall, it seems people are happy with the new UI, new features and new refinements.

Forum discussion at Bing Community, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Publishers Giving Microsoft pubCenter Second Chance

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 4:02pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN ContentAds

Now that Yahoo Publisher Network is done, where do publishers go when their earnings with Google AdSense falter? Well, if they are lucky enough to get into the Microsoft's Content Ads, aka PubCenter then they can use that as an alternative.

In fact, one publisher did so and is reporting at WebmasterWorld that he has been impressed with the earnings with PubCenter ads in the past few weeks. He said:

This last drop in adsense revenue pushed me to try Microsoft ads again and I am happy to report, it is paying what adsense paid before the drop (more on some days)!

I thought this may be temporary, but it's been a few weeks now and I'm impressed. The targeting is way better than it used to be and I can't tell you how good it feels to know there is another option that works.

Not everyone agrees and still says the targeting is off and the income is bad. Here is a sample ad to see how good or bad the targeting is, in live:

Are you liking Microsoft PubCenter or sticking with Google AdSense?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

Bing Logo Now On Facebook Search Results

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 3:43pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

4 months ago Microsoft made a deal with Facebook to power some of their search results.

Today, if you do a search on Facebook, the web results are powered by Bing and more importantly, carry the Bing logo.

The Bing logo is only shown on the "web results" section of the Facebook results. But this is a major thing for Microsoft, showing their Bing logo on Facebook. It also gives Microsoft insight into the types of queries happening behind Facebook's Google blockade, which is invaluable.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Search Results Now, Switch Over Complete August/September

Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread points to a recent presentation video by Yahoo and Microsoft of the transition timelines for Bing to begin powering Yahoo on both the organic and paid side of search.

Did you know that Bing is already or will very soon begin testing powering Yahoo's search results? Yes, in Yahoo Search, you should technically see the same organic results that you would see in Bing - possibly any day now. Of course, this is being tested and you and I may not see it, while your neighbor may see it. This should be in testing mode right now.

When will Yahoo switch completely over to Bing? Either in August or September of this year. That obviously assumes that the tests go well. But we are looking for an August or September 2010 transition on the organic side of Yahoo to Microsoft search.

Here is a slide from the presentation that shares those details:

I am tracking several search results on Yahoo and Bing and will report back as soon as I see them matching. Again, if you see it before me, do let me know.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Postscript: Yahoo sent me this update:

Our goal is to transition algorithmic and paid search in the U.S and Canada in 2010 and we will soon start a series of external bucket tests (note: we’re only doing internal tests today). We will be sharing details about these tests (when they start, etc) with our customers first. So while we're not ready to answer your specific questions today, we would be happy to bring you into the loop when the time is right.
In terms of the transition timing outlined on the slide – as we've said prior, our focus is on providing advertisers with a quality transition experience while protecting the all important holiday season. If we don’t believe we can do both in that timeframe, we will wait until 2011. That is the reason why the slide states that "we may adjust transition timing and dates as needed."

Bing Creating Their Own Caffeine Indexing Speed?

Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has two webmasters claiming Bing is getting much faster at indexing new content than in the past. One said, the speed is almost, if not, similar to Google's speed of indexing content.

Google made this big stink about Caffeine and they have every right to. Google is the best not just because of their ranking algorithm, but because of the speed of indexing and displaying indexed content in the search results. For Bing to compete with Google head on, they need to get faster - not just better. Getting faster and keeping quality intact is not easy. Any improvements are noticed and I am glad people are noticing improvements with Bing.

Unfortunately, my tests don't show that, but maybe with some sites, Bing is incredibly fast.

For example, I just posted a new blog entry minutes ago here. Searching for the title shows Google has it already, but Bing does not:

Google result:

Bing result:

So is Bing indeed getting faster and they just dislike this incredibly useful and highly authoritative web site?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Winning Hearts of Children In UK?

Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has grassroots reporting from parents in the UK about Bing's market share.

It seems like many UK children are really loving Bing, Microsoft's search engine. From the parent's perspective, the kids are coming home and talking about Bing, not Google. They are also telling their parents that Bing is what the home pages are set to on their school computers.

Here are some quotes from the thread:

My 11 year old was using my computer at the weekend and I noticed they used bing.com without any prompting from me for or against. A friend said that is because bing.com is the default search engine in schools at the moment. My kid seems perfectly happy with it.
Watch out google, this is how the revolution begins!

I think I can help here. Many years back, I am pretty sure I heard on the BBC that Bill (Gates) made a deal with the British government to give computers to every school in the UK. Now i don't think they are in any way mandated to use Bing, but I expect they are set up that way by default.
But on top of that (not that I count for much) all five of the PC's in my house have Bing as the home page, and certainly, my kids (aged 9 and 10) use it by default. they certainly KNOW Google and use it alot as well, but they are the next generation - and the pretty picture counts.

As the moderator of the forum says, Bing is "Winning the hearts and minds" of these children.

Something for Google to worry about or this is just a few schools with Bing set as the default search engine?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Tries To Launch Social Search Improvements

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 2:56pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Yesterday, during the Keynote with the SVP of Microsoft, Bing introduced a way to search Twitter and Facebook using bing.com/social.

As of 10pm (EST), 10 hours later, the feature which should have been live 10 hours ago, is still not live. I hope by the time this post goes live, that bing.com/social shows more than just an error page:

When it does go live, the features demoed should include:

Status updates and shared links from Facebook fan pages
Aggregate shared link data for non-fan pages
New home page with trends from Twitter and Facebook data
Better ways to filter and sort Tweets and Facebook updates

But until then, it is kind of hard to play with.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one response that doesn't seem positive:

Ugh. UGH!

Anyway, time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It does now seem to be live.

Bing Drops Cashback Proving You Can't Buy Search Market Share

Posted: June 7th, 2010, 3:24pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

On Friday, Microsoft announced they are dropping the cashback program. Microsoft Cashback enticed searchers to try Bing over other search engines by giving them cash back after buying through a search ad.

I did the walk through on how cashback works a while back. I personally used it every now on then on big purchases, it was a great way to not just get a great deal, but to get money back on great deals.

Unfortunately for me, Microsoft said it didn't work and didn't bring in enough market share to keep it around. Cashback will be gone on July 30th at 9:00 pm PST. Microsoft said, "but after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for."

I always wondered how costly this program was, but I guess it was a marketing expense.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Bing Continues To Improve 301 Redirect Handling

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 3:25pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Back in the day, Bing just couldn't properly handle 301 redirects but that issue seems to be coming to a close. We saw improvements on Bing's 301 handling both in October 2009 and November 2009. It appears Bing has gone on record this month that they have indeed made strides in their 301 handling.

301 redirects are known as permanent redirects. For example, I use a 301 redirect to redirect seoroundtable.com to seroundtable.com because many people mess up our name and link to the wrong place. 301 redirects are how this should be handled and tell the search engines that one URL has been permanently moved to a different URL.

A Bing Help thread has a webmaster claiming his 3.5 month issue with Bing and how they handled his 301 redirects is finally resolved. Bing's Program Manager, Brett Yount confirmed they did actually do something to improve this. Brett said:

While I can't provide the root cause, I can say that the team has been working on the fix for some time now and it appears to have helped other sites with similar issues as well.

Brett then gets all emotional and says:

I spend a great amount of time analyzing and then reporting trends to key teams within Bing. Sometimes it takes awhile to find a root cause out of the effects I present and sometimes it takes awhile to find the CORRECT fix--or even an interim fix to problems.

However, as I have said in the past, I will say it again now:

I don't care if your site has 5 pages or 5,000,000, I will do my best to find a solution for you. If it appears that you have fallen off my radar, ping me again. I don't mind. If your site is being affected by a chronic issue, rest assured that all of us at Bing are working to find a solution for not just you, but everyone else out there suffering from the same issue. And from all of us at Bing, thank you for your patience.

Thanks Brett and the Bing team!

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

Bing Updates Language Detection After One or Two Crawls

Posted: April 28th, 2010, 3:52pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

I've never been happy with how Bing handles geo-location detection of web sites. They use and rely mostly on the meta language tag to determine if the site should be in Bing US versus a localized version of Bing. Google's Matt Cutts somewhat mocked how Bing handles this by saying:

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.

That being said, this is how Bing handles it and if you see your site in a regional Bing that doesn't make sense, you can change it by updating your meta language tag.

Brett Yount said in a Bing Community thread that once this is updated, Bing should update your site within one or two crawls. Brett said:

Change that and the issue should be corrected within one or two crawls.

So overall, if your site gets crawled once per day, you should be fine within a couple days.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Uses Hyphens As Word Separators in URLs

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 3:09pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has Bing's program manager, Brett Yount confirming that Bing prefers hyphens in the URLs as a word separator.

He said:

Hyphens are the preferred character for separating two words in URLs.

Google also uses hyphens as word separators so it is a good thing to know both engines handle them pretty much the same way.

Nothing ground breaking here, but a solid SEO point to have in your toolkit.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Microsoft Behind Google Because Of Long-Tail Keyword Relevancy?

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 2:58pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

During Yusuf Mehdi's keynote last week at SES, Yusuf said Microsoft is behind Google due mostly on how they handle the long-tail keyword. eWeek explores this in more detail saying:

Microsoft fell so far behind Google in the search engine market because it failed to retrieve relevant results for a long line of less popular queries, a senior Microsoft executive told the crowd at the Search Engine Strategies show here March 25.
Such was the key reason Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Group for Microsoft Bing, offered for why Google is light-years ahead of Microsoft in the search market. Google commands 65 percent of the U.S. share search market, compared with 11.5 percent for Microsoft Bing.

Mehdi, responding to a keynote host's observation that Microsoft was late to the Internet and search, said, "We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail. We actually focused a lot on the head of the queries. ... It turned out the long tail was much more important."

It seems that webmasters and SEOs agree that although Bing is pretty good at the short types of keywords but when it comes to longer, more specific keyword searches, they don't do a great job.

Do you agree?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Updates UI, Improves Search Results & Adds Foursquare to Maps

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 2:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Bing announced feature upgrades to Bing at SES New York yesterday, if you missed it, you can read our live blog coverage of the announcement. The announcement included the following updates to Bing:

Updated user interface designed to get the answer faster
More celebrity and sport answers
Way to filter auto results
Mobile improvements with Windows 7
Foursquare added to Bing Maps
and more

Here are some screen captures:

Overall, the new features are welcomed to Bing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The UK Bing Ads : Here Is a Video

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

As many of you know, Microsoft is conducting a major ad blitz in the UK in order to capture market share for Bing, their search engine.

Bing's product manager sent me a link to one of the new commercials, which is now on YouTube. Here is a video of the new commercial:

What do you think? It looks similar to the US commercials, just with UK accents.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

MSN's New Portal Now Live

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:57pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

If you visit MSN.com today, you may notice a new look and feel for the site. The beta design is now the new official look for MSN. Like it or not, this is the new look for now.

Greg Sterling reports that about 50% of the Bing search queries are driven from the MSN portal. So this new design may or may not have an impact on that. 50% is major and clearly Microsoft is aware of that.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft Aims To Capture UK Search Market Share with Ads

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 1:55pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

There are reports that Microsoft is going to do a huge ad push in the UK in an effort to capture market share there. Currently, Microsoft's Bing has a 3% share of search, whereas Google holds about a 90% share.

Here is the news:

Microsoft is to launch a multimillion-pound TV ad campaign for its search engine Bing, as part of a major marketing push designed to challenge Google's dominance of the UK search market, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
Microsoft will certainly have its work cut out winning over consumers – it currently holds about a 3% share of the search market while Google controls about 90%.

"This is a big moment – we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath," said the managing director and vice-president of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some comments, here is one:

In the UK I believe there is a large number of people who do not like Microsoft and unless they can hide their identity as far as Bing is concerned, I doubt they will make any great inroads however much money they pour into Bing. And that mention of taking out their slingshots and taking on Goliath is a joke! Who is the real Goliath between the two companies?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing: We Know About Your Images & Choose Not To Show Them

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

We rarely ever talk about Bing's outstanding image search, but I spotted a thread today in the Bing Community forums on that topic.

In short, one webmaster complained that Bing had about 50% of the images from his site, when compared to Google. So Google had about 50 pictures from this guys site in their index, coming up for a site command. Bing had about half that.

Brett Yount forwarded the complaint the the image search team at Bing and when he received a response, he copy and pasted it in the forums. This is what they said:

All in all I would say we have ok coverage for this site. We do not include all images that we know about in our index -- it is quite plausible that we decided to not include certain images from this site due to better relative ranking of other sites during crawl time. We should see its image search rank go up (and our coverage of it improve) as the site gets more popular and the images get reused and referred to by more sites.

This is really no different than web search - Google, Bing and other search engines may not consider a page worthy of crawling or indexing due to it's popularity or lack there of. This works the same way with images, according to Bing.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Doesn't Like Redirect Chains, No One Does Really

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread talks about Bing's crawlers and indexers ability in following chains of redirects. A redirect chain is when you have two or more URLs that are being redirects to another URL. For example, if I have domain.com/pageA redirect to domain.com/pageB and then from domain.com/pageB to domain.com/pageC - that is a redirect chain.

Search engines typically crawl them fine, if they are done using 301 redirects. But it takes them a longer time to figure multiple redirects in a chain of redirects. I believe most search engines can handle them, but your job as an SEO is to make sure to limit the number of redirects to one or so, so there is not a long chain.

Brett Yount from Bing even said they do not like redirect chains. In the Bing Community, he said:

While we do not like redirect chains, we are able to follow them. But if you have a 302 redirect in the chain--even if there is a 301 after it--expect that the page may not get all of the potential rank or may not get indexed at all.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Recommends W3C Compliant Code For Better Indexing

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 12:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has a Microsoft Bing representative telling SEOs that W3C complaint code can help with indexing content.

Brett Yount, the program manager at Bing Webmaster Center, said:

Clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the SEs. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template.

We all know that Google said time and time again that validated code does not get a ranking boost, but they never said it wouldn't help with indexing and crawling. Clean code, which can be validated through the W3C's tools, can make for more efficient crawling and possibly faster indexing.

This is at least according to Bing.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Masking MSNBot As Internet Explorer or a Rogue Bot?

Posted: February 22nd, 2010, 2:46pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread reports from one webmaster that someone is masking MSNBot around as a browser, either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Here are the reported IPs and UserAgent's being reporting by this webmaster:

The following IP addresses are from MSN's search bots, but use what appears to be just normal user agents.
65.55.109.22
65.55.109.106
65.55.109.118
65.55.109.119
65.55.109.120
65.55.109.162
65.55.109.209
65.55.109.212
65.55.110.16
65.55.110.21
65.55.110.41
65.55.110.88
65.55.110.107
65.55.110.121
65.55.110.132
65.55.110.164

The user agent looks like this "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)"

This is not the first time Microsoft Bing has been accused of masking their bots as browser useragents. We had a similar report back in September where MSNBot was using Mozilla by way of UserAgent.

Brett Yount, Bing's representative, said, "Could you send this information to bwmc@microsoft.com and I will have the crawling team investigate?"

So currently, this is not confirmed, but it is weird.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Webmaster Tools Mysterious Missing Domains?

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 1:54pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has reports that when webmasters authenticate domains within Bing Webmaster Tools, the next day, the domains are no longer listed. Supposedly there are several reports about this in the past week or so.

Here is one report:

I (for the very first time) submitted several URL's, and I also authenticated my website by adding a LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml to my website sites, and I also submitted a sitemap.xml. They all showed yesterday.
But when I login today, I don't see any of my URL's from yesterday.

Brett Yount from Bing said that he is really not sure what is going on but he doesn't seem to be the only one reporting the issue. Brett said:

This is the third or fourth post I've seen today regarding this problem. I'm contacting our devs to find out more information.

This is not a confirmed report yet, but there seems to be something fishy going on here.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Advertising On Intellitxt

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 2:29pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that Bing is advertising their search engine on Intellitxt. Intellitxt are those ads you see inline articles, where you mouse over a word and an annoying ad pops up. I personally find those ads to be incredibly annoying, intrusive and invasive. But many publishers use them and according to the WebmasterWorld post, Bing is using it to advertise their search engine.

The thread said:

At a very popular UK website I noticed an Intellitxt ad featuring a Bing Search of the phrase in the ad. Good idea by Bing.

I do not have a screen shot, but if you see one, please send it my way.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Indexing New Content & Sites Faster?

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 2:27pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has some positive news for the Microsoft Bing team! The thread is praising Bing for speeding up their indexing and ranking of new pages, updated content and new web sites.

This comes several weeks after Bing declared they were slow at indexing new sites. So I am happy that webmasters, at least some, are happy with the speed of Bing's crawler and indexer.

Mack, the forum moderator summed it up, saying:

Bing is getting quick! Even when it comes to new sites/domains.

Two additional webmasters agreed. To be fair, I have seen a slow down of complaints in the Bing forums about complaints of their sites not being indexed. But that can be for many reasons.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

Bing Leads Customers To Competitors With Their Best Match Information

Posted: February 16th, 2010, 2:32pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A complaint from a Carpet store owner in the Bing Community shows how Bing is sending his customers to his competitors. If you search for [carpetswarehouse.com] on Bing, and mouse over the "Best Match Information" arrow on the right of the result, Bing will show the wrong information.

In fact, Bing is showing the phone number to his competitor. Here is a picture:

The Carpet guy said:

Bing is showing. "Customer service 800-686-2442." That is my competitor's phone number. How do I change to my number 1-800-565-5021.

Now, Google has had this problem in the past with Google Maps. In fact, this comes up on occasion with Google.

Bing's community manager, Brett Yount, explained how this can be fixed at Bing. He said:

Please contact support using the form located at:

[https:]

In the drop down box, please select, "Change Best Match Information"

I wonder how long this change will take? I also wonder how Bing got his competitor's phone number.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Update: Nice, Bing fixed it the same day.

Bing: "We Do Not Index 302 Redirected Pages"

Posted: February 11th, 2010, 3:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has Bing's program manager, Brett Yount, saying that they do not index the destination pages of a 302 redirect. Let me quote you what he said:

We do not index 302 redirected pages, so this is probably the main issue for not indexing your home page.

The site in question here is www.kerala.travel. As you can see, as I write this post, the site is not indexed by Bing.

Now, I assume Brett meant to say that a 302 redirect to a page will not block the page from being indexed. But rather, if the only way for Bing to crawl to the page is via a 302 redirect, Bing will not index it. If there are other links to the destination page, then Bing will likely index it.

Or maybe I am wrong and Bing will not index 302 redirected pages.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Updates Webmaster FAQs Into 82 Questions

Posted: February 11th, 2010, 2:39pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, announced they have revised the Webmaster FAQs into a single 28 page PDF document. The document can be downloaded over here.

It has 82 detailed questions and answers, organized into 12 categories. The questions and answers are ironically hyperlinked in the PDF document, but not available as a web page. I guess those Q&As won't be indexed too well by their own search engine (yes, search engines do crawl PDFs, but you know).

Brett Yount, Bing's forum rep, posted a thread in the Bing Community announcing this as well. He said, "our Technical Writer, Rick Dejarnette, combined our FAQs into one PDF for easy reference."

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

Bing Too Easy To Rank Well In?

Posted: January 29th, 2010, 2:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A funny WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO scratching his head in wonderment as to how he ranks so well in Bing, without really having any SEO reason to be. Let me quote what he said:

Right now my two-month-old site, with NO backlinks established but good internal content and linking (not SEO'd, just logically laid out), is #1 in Bing for a term that surprised the heck out of me... related, yes, but seriously American Express or Mastercard or any number of established entities should be #1 on these terms. They are #2 and #3.

At first I thought it was maybe some kind of local thing... that those companies are nowhere near me, but my site IS near me and therefore it's showing local relevant results first? But nope, if I remote into a server in a datacenter on the other side of the country and run a search from there it's #1 there too. Crazy...

In Google, the site is half way down page 3 for the same term, about where I expected it would be given its age and competition.

I'm certainly not going to call up Bing and complain about it, but it's freakin weird.

I was hoping, like for me, the thread would make you smile after a long week.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing's Auto Search Suggestions Gets More Current

Posted: January 21st, 2010, 2:32pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

The Bing Search Blog announced that they have now made their search suggestions more current. Now, Bing will update the search suggestions every 15 minutes or so, to take into account breaking news and current trends.

For example, the Australian Open is going on right now and here is me typing [aus] into Bing:

Google already does this with their search suggestions, so it is nice to see Bing go this route as well. Now, Bing will have to deal with questions about censorship of trending topics.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Showing Related Search Results By Default

Posted: January 18th, 2010, 2:22pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about a search on Bing for [digital camera]. If you search on Bing for that query, you will not only see search results that match [digital camera] but Bing will show you other related queries and their search results.

Bing will show you 3 additional results for each of the following related queries, they include: Digital Camera Brands, Digital Camera Types, Top 10 Digital Cameras, Digital Camera Repair and Digital Camera Accessories. Here is a video showing this:

The interesting part here is that this is somewhat like the Google knows best but not fully. Here Bing is showing you what you queried for first and then shows you other search results that they think would be useful.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If Microsoft / Yahoo Deal Goes Through: adCenter Will Replace Yahoo Search Marketing

Posted: January 14th, 2010, 2:14pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there in the paid search ad space. If the Microsoft & Yahoo do end up closing their deal, which seems likely to me, Yahoo Search Marketing will no longer exist.

The Yahoo Search Marketing console and campaigns you currently run will be either automatically imported into Microsoft adCenter or you will have to manually make that change. Microsoft adCenter will power the ads on Yahoo, Yahoo won't power those ads.

A WebmasterWorld thread seems to have a lot of confusion over this point. Advertisers seem to not want to spend too much time on either adCenter or YSM optimizing their campaigns in fear that the deal will go through and that time would be wasted. I for one think that this is still going to take a really long time, so go ahead and optimize the campaigns. But if the deal does go through and they do begin the migration, the migration will be from Yahoo to Microsoft, not the other way around.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft Bing Says They Are "Fairly Slow"

Posted: January 7th, 2010, 2:42pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

One of the latest comments to come from Microsoft's Bing representative in the Bing Forums was that they consider themselves to be "fairly slow." Fairly slow at indexing new sites and new pages, that is.

Brett Yount, the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, said in a Bing Forums thread:

It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow.

Did he just say that? For real?

So what is Microsoft's solution to get new sites into their index? Well, either spam Digg or Yahoo Buzz to be discovered or post a message in the Site not in index thread at Bing Forums and they will manually add you. Yes, there is a forum thread pretty much acting as a URL submit form. How 1995 of them.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Microsoft adCenter Offering Free Search Ads Over New Years?

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 2:03pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

A WebmasterWorld thread and adCenter Forum thread have reports that Microsoft adCenter is reporting that clicks are not being charged. Yes, the adCenter reports are showing a $0.00 cost per click in their reports.

Here are some of the reports from the advertisers:

Whilst I'd love this to be real, looks like a bug as clicks priced at 0.00 aren't so common!

No matter which report I call up - I'm not being charged (according to the reports) for clicks.

Yes, I'm seeing the same thing. All reports yesterday and today show $0.00.
I'm guessing we'll see this resolved Monday morning. On the other hand, it might be Microsoft's way of thanking us for our business in 2009 ;)

Many suspect this is some sort of reporting glitch. I suspect so to. But it would be nice if it was not a glitch and Microsoft gave some of their advertisers a nice New Years bonus.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and adCenter Forum.

Update: I guess this is a bug, @adCenter tweeted:

Bing's MSNBot Crawling Fake File Names?

Posted: December 28th, 2009, 2:41pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A WebmasterWorld thread and an older Bing Forums thread has discussion from webmasters over the issue of Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot, crawling file names that do not exist on a specific site.

This reminders me of the ongoing issue of Bing creating fake referrals in webmaster log files. This has been going on for years, where Microsoft claims they have fixed it, but never really has.

In this specific case, it seems like Bing is creating file names on a specific site to crawl. Wel, they are not creating files, just trying to fetch pages that do not and never have existed on a specific site. I am not sure if this is a Bing issue or a webmaster issue.

A long time WebmasterWorld member explained the issue:

In what is apparently a rather old bad behavior, msnbot has a practice of regularly requesting totally manufactured URIs that appear to be designed to trigger 404 errors. Here are two sample log entries of the two styles of bogus URIs msnbot requests:
'65.55.207.126'¦Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:39:49 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/ADBF3C7AB534E8356F30D8AC05291640_00000.temp019f.html'¦''
'65.55.207.28'¦Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:46:22 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/000166709_00001.temp00be.html'¦''

The requests ALWAYS take on one of the formats above starting with either a 32byte GUID or a nine digit integer.

In the Bing thread, another person said:

For many many years, msnbot has been crawling my sites looking for files that have never existed... i'm trying to figure out why...
the filenames have changed slightly in recent times but they have been similar in structure since the beginning... they are something like 000092601_00002.temp0001.htm... in other words, 9 numbers underscore 5 numbers dot temp 4 numbers dot htm... the search for these is all over my server's directory tree...

I'll emphasize once more that these files have never existed on my site and i have no clue how msnbot may have picked them up...

Honestly, I feel bad that I am always beating up on Microsoft. I know they are new to the game, when you compare them to Google. But I have to report these issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Bing Forums.

Bing Doesn't Support the Canonical Tag At All Right Now

Posted: December 24th, 2009, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

There is this old and upsetting thread in the Bing Forums about how Bing handles the canonical tag. The thread is filled with misinformation. Matt McGee's post at Search Engine Land a week ago says it clearly.

Bing says it's still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content.

You got that right, 11 months ago, Google, Yahoo and Bing announced support for the Canonical tag. As far as I know, only Google really uses it and they even added cross domain canonical support this month. Where is Bing at this? Well, in the next several months they hope to support a single domain use of the canonical tag and hopefully soon after the cross domain support. So it would have taken Bing over a year since they announced support of this tag to actually support it?

I am not too upset about that, to be honest. What I am more upset about is that official Bing support representatives are pretty much lying in the Bing Forums. Brett Yount, the Product Manager of Bing Webmaster Center said:

accourding to our blog post, http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx, the canonical tag is used as a hint only.

No, it is not used as a hint or anything. It is not used period, not yet. Maybe in four months, but not yet.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Funny Ballmer Firing Bing Employee Hoax

Posted: December 22nd, 2009, 2:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

This is a hoax, this is not true, but it spread around the internet over the weekend and I found it pretty funny. Again, this is a comic, who did a skit of some sort. Microsoft confirmed this is not a real employee or ex-employee at Microsoft.

The video portrays a disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee describing how he was fired by Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, over not saying "Bing" with enthusiasm.

If you know the jokes about Ballmer, this is pretty funny.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Bug: Bing Webmaster Tools Not Accepting URLs with Hyphens

Posted: December 17th, 2009, 3:03pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

There are a few reports in a Bing Forum thread that adding a site to Bing Webmaster Tools might not work. Specifically, if the URL or domain contains a hyphen (dash) such as www.best-domain.com.

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster team confirmed the bug, saying:

Currently, we are having a few difficulties which I just received confirmation from the indexing team. They are currently working on it, but said that if you try a couple times, it should work. If not, and your site isn't in the index at all , please post on the not in index thread and I will work to get your home page (only) into the index.

I personally tried adding a domain with a hyphen and it worked for me on the first try. So maybe it is resolved or maybe those specific domains have other issues?

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Microsoft Might Add Bing Page Score to MSN Toolbar

Posted: December 17th, 2009, 2:35pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Brett Yount from the Bing Webmaster Team dropped a hint in the Bing Forums that they may add the Bing Page Score (similar to Google's PageRank) to the MSN Toolbar.

Bing has what they call Bing Page Score when you login to their Bing Webmaster Center. Someone asked in the thread, "is it possible to enable page rank in bing toolbar?"

Soon after, Brett Yount from Bing responded saying:

We might once we complete the rework of that tool, which will be Fall earliest. Good news is, there are some changes in the works due in May/June to many things important to the webmasters frequenting these forums.

So there are two things here:

(1) Bing's Page Score may come to their Toolbar.
(2) They will be reworking "that tool," which I believe is talking about Page Score specifically.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Bing's MSNBot Crawls Twice, Once For Compressed HTML & Again For Uncompressed

Posted: December 16th, 2009, 2:38pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Here is one more oddity to add to Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot. Why on earth are people reporting that MSNBot is crawling the same page twice, once for the compressed version and then once again for the uncompressed version? Technically, it should probably only crawl once and it should opt for the compressed, gzip version - don't you think?

We have two threads complaining about this, one oldish one at WebmasterWorld and another at Bing Forums. Let me quote the Bing thread:

I've notice that bing is crawling each page of my website twice, first making an HTTP 1.1 request and getting a compressed response then immediately issuing an HTTP 1.0 request to receive the same page without gzip compression

The following lines from my log show the issue (there are thousands more similar occurrences):
65.55.207.74 - - [13/Dec/2009:14:58:42 +0000] "GET /specimen/235698/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1742 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.207.74 - - [13/Dec/2009:14:59:06 +0000] "GET /specimen/235698/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4259 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.106.209 - - [13/Dec/2009:15:03:08 +0000] "GET /specimen/250262/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1733 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.106.209 - - [13/Dec/2009:15:03:14 +0000] "GET /specimen/250262/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4164 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

This seems a waste of bandwidth and completely defeats the point of supporting http compression.

Indeed a waste of bandwidth and yes, it defeats the point of supporting HTTP compression.

A Bing representative, Brett Yount said:

could you please mail this information to bwmc@microsoft.com and I will get our crawling team to check it out?

But we have no confirmation from Bing on why this issue is occurring or when it will be fixed. Like I said, just one more oddity to add to MSNBot's crawl behavior.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Bing Forums.

Bing Requires 3 MSNBot Crawls To Register 301 Redirects

Posted: December 10th, 2009, 2:40pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

I spotted a useful tidbit for SEOs in the Bing Forums today. Brett Yount from Bing Webmaster Center team explained how Bing picks up on 301 redirects.

Brett said it can take two to three crawls from Bing to register a 301 redirect in their index. Brett said:

By design, our crawler usually takes 2-3 crawls before it registers the redirect.

I wonder how many crawls Google takes to do the same thing? I can see why you would want to wait at least for a second crawl to confirm a 301 redirect is indeed legit.

We had some reports recently that Bing is handling 301s much better now than they have in the past.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Bing Goes Offline for 30 Minutes

Posted: December 4th, 2009, 4:23am CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Bing went offline for about 30 minutes. I captured a screen shot of Microsoft's search engine having issues about mid-way through. Here it is:

TechCrunch said it was down for about 30 minutes. Twitter was buzzing about the news, and there were threads at Bing Community & WebmasterWorld.

Bing tweeted when they came back online:

This may be the first time that Bing.com has been down in its relatively short history.

Forum discussion at Bing Community & WebmasterWorld.

Update: Bing blog has a post on this.

Bing Maps Adds Features & Augmented Reality

Posted: December 3rd, 2009, 2:28pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Microsoft made buzz yesterday with the announcements on the Bing Maps blog and Bing Search Blog.

Greg Sterling explains it well at Search Engine Land as "Bing Maps breaks new ground in online mapping even as it plays a bit of catch up with Google."

The augmented reality comes in where Microsoft overlays data on those maps in a more social way. Microsoft explains:

Photosynth and Silverlight are the underlying technologies in Bing Maps that connect everything and help provide the more seamless experience. Based on Seadragon and Photo Tourism concepts, Photosynth lets us literally “stitch” together photographs to provide more realistic view of locations as they appear in real life. Photosynth-enabled Streetside imagery is built on geometric models that are reconstructed underneath the imagery to provide a truly 3D experience that shows locations as they are in real life.

The screen shots at the various blogs are neat, the only downside is the requirement to install Silverlight (I am a mac user). For more coverage of this, see Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft Bing November 2009 Search Update?

Posted: November 20th, 2009, 3:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Bing UK Out of Beta, But Too Soon?

Posted: November 19th, 2009, 2:49pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Yet Another Bing October 2009 Update?

Posted: October 27th, 2009, 3:32pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

3 Days Later, Bing Finally Fixes Webmaster Tools Bug

Posted: October 15th, 2009, 3:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft's Bing Hiding Search Results For Perez Hilton

Posted: October 14th, 2009, 3:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Bing Adds Visual Search & More Links On Home Page

Posted: October 1st, 2009, 3:18pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Bing's Fake Referrer Spam Back, Now Hiding Referrer Now?

Posted: September 10th, 2009, 3:08pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN 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 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.

Bing Not Honoring Robots.txt Directives?

Posted: September 9th, 2009, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft Claims To Fix Fake Referrals or "Single Word Query" Complaint

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 3:31pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Traffic From spresults.aspx Comes From IE6 Search Pane

Posted: July 24th, 2009, 2:57pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Is Bing's Algorithm Domain Name Heavy?

Posted: July 13th, 2009, 3:49pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Is Microsoft Bing Slow At Malware Reviews?

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 4:06pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Bing & Yahoo Can't Tell Time in Tehran, Iran

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 3:23pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Getting Listed In Bing News

Posted: July 8th, 2009, 3:42pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

New MSNBot Named adidxbot Causing Trouble

Posted: July 7th, 2009, 3:08pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Do You Like The Bing Commercials?

Posted: June 19th, 2009, 2:31pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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:

Do You Like The Bing Commercials?(survey)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft Sends $750K Warning To Click Fraudsters

Posted: June 17th, 2009, 2:54pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

The New York TImes reports Microsoft has filed suit against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia. The suit comes after a year of investigative work by Microsoft in tracking down reports of click fraud.

According to the NY Times, these defendants allegedly:

Microsoft said it found a pattern of click fraud on its search pages, where lists ranked by relevance and popularity appear alongside a handful of paid results. Advertisers bid on what they will pay to appear in the paid-search results for certain keywords. The more an advertiser pays, the higher they are in that list, and advertisers usually pay for each click on their ad.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Maybe to send a warning to those who are involved in click fraud to stop doing it or else. Or maybe Microsoft wants more buzz about their search ad network, adCenter?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing's Instant Translation Gets Webmaster Approval

Posted: June 15th, 2009, 3:16pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

70% Of Our Readers Like Bing

Posted: June 9th, 2009, 3:58pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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

Bing Hijacks IE6 Toolbar Search, Google Users Upset

Posted: June 2nd, 2009, 7:41pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Is Bing Not Honoring NOODP Tag?

Posted: June 2nd, 2009, 3:32pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft Getting Ready to Launch New Search Engine - Kumo? Bing? Live? MSN?

Posted: May 20th, 2009, 4:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Live Search's HTTP Headers Malformed

Posted: May 4th, 2009, 3:56pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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
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Moderator, jdMorgan adds one more issue to the pack. He added that Microsoft's Live Search headers have a missing value after the If-Modified-Since date.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Global Live Search Local Listings Coming Soon

Posted: April 24th, 2009, 3:46pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft To Open adCenter Content Ads As Public Beta

Posted: April 22nd, 2009, 4:11pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN ContentAds

I spotted a member in a DigitalPoint Forums thread with a level of certainty that Microsoft will be announcing at adTech San Francisco today that they are opening up ContentAds (also may be known as PubCenter) as a public beta. ContentAds is Microsoft's competing Google AdSense product.

An open beta means that virtually anyone should be able to sign up for the product and test it against Google AdSense. It is also rumored that Microsoft will set up a companion blog for the ContentAds (PubCenter) today, April 22nd.

In March 2008, Microsoft began accepting beta users via a sign up form. Since then, it has remained fairly quiet except for some comparisons made by beta users between ContentAds & AdSense. ContentAds began being tested in June 2007 by a few publishers and some really early tests in October 2006. The earliest rumors of this product came in December 2005 and then again in February 2006.

Hopefully the big beta launch is today.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft confirms this and adds more details.

Microsoft To Fix Fake Referrer Data From Live Search

Posted: April 22nd, 2009, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Reaction: Microsoft Testing New Search Features: Code Name Kumo

Posted: March 4th, 2009, 2:08pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

New to Microsoft adCenter: Custom Dates on Campaigns

Posted: January 12th, 2009, 2:05pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Discovery in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread reports that Microsoft adCenter now gives advertisers the basic feature of allowing advertisers to plug in custom dates into the reporting engine.

To see the custom date range option, go to the campaigns and at the top right of the report, click on "change." Here is a screen capture:

Then, it will open up to let you enter in a custom date range:

Discovery said, "Well it's one of those "features" you would expect to have because Google has had it for so long now. However, Adcenter just got this into their system."

I am sure advertisers will appreciate this small, but important addition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

MSN adCenter's Content Ads Showing Horrible Click Through Rates?

Posted: January 2nd, 2009, 2:31pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: MSN ContentAds

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 private beta. I can tell you that I tested the ads on my personal blog and actually removed them about a week ago, due to the poor results in revenue making.

That being said, what I did see Brent post in his MSN Adcenter’s Publisher Beta vs. Google Adsense, which is now 301 redirecting to the home page. He said that the CTR (click through rate) was a fraction of what he noticed with his Google AdSense ads. I believe it was less than half, but possibly even worse.

Clearly, a publisher program that gets paid out by click and not impression, with a low CTR is not a publisher program that publishers want to participate in. MSN Content Ads is still very new and in very limited beta. I suspect it will do much better in 2009, but it appears they still have a long way to go to earn the trust of publishers and take market share from Google AdSense.

Note, if anyone has a cached copy of the post, please share it with us. :)

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Update: I received a screen capture of the original post and posted over here. You can see that the CTR with Google AdSense was .11%, but with Microsoft Content Ads it was .01% - huge difference and it showed in the earnings.

Live Search Begins Crawling JavaScript with MSNBot-Media

Posted: January 2nd, 2009, 1:49pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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 Gives Microsoft The Hard Truth

Posted: December 31st, 2008, 3:06pm CET by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Best Place to Get Webmaster Help for Live Search

Posted: October 23rd, 2008, 3:25pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft and Facebook Partner for Search

Posted: October 10th, 2008, 4:41pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft Plans adCenter Upgrade in Fall 2008

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 2:24pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

The adCenter blog announced that they will be releasing an update prior to the holiday season. The update will include the following features to their search ad product, adCenter:

Expanded your billing and payment options
Simplified your campaign management experience
Improved the way you create and analyze reports
Updated your keyword research capabilities.

If you want a sneak peak at these features, you can apply to the adCenter beta program over here.

Forum discussion at adCenter Community but there was a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that was removed.

Small Live Search Update or Hiccup?

Posted: October 3rd, 2008, 3:34pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

We have two Webmaster World 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 Webmaster World 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 Webmaster World and DigitalPoint Forums.

Introducing Microsoft SearchPerks: Get Paid to Search ... Again

Posted: October 2nd, 2008, 5:42pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Live.com Search Results Feature Powerset Integration

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 4:19pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta Feature Requests

Posted: September 12th, 2008, 3:22pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Yesterday we talked about how Yahoo is lacking a desktop editor for their search marketing platform. Today, there is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums on the topic of improving the adCenter Editor Beta application.

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, Mel66, said offered up five pieces of advice:

Don't require us to hit "save" to save the changes, it is too easy to forget
Add help content in the tool
Give better warnings as to why something might not be working
Enable status changes from "draft" to "active"
Allow us to mass edit the parameter based keyword destination URLs.

Of these five suggestions, the official adCenter representative confirmed items number one and two are coming soon.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Live Search Greatly Improves Webmaster Tools But Webmasters Don't Give a Hoot

Posted: August 8th, 2008, 3:26pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Tracking Search Traffic Versus Content Traffic in Microsoft adCenter

Posted: July 17th, 2008, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

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 your adCenter search traffic differently from your adCenter content network traffic. How do you do it? Well, in Google, it is easy. You just add {ifsearch:} and {ifcontent:} parameters to the URLs and it is done. With adCenter, it may not be that easy.

The official Microsoft representative, adCenterRep, said this cannot be done with Microsoft. Instead, you need to set up two different adGroups for each campaign. Let me quote you:

At this time, the only way to keep the data seperated is by having two adGroups. Although I have submitted your feedback and will have the developmental team review the idea.
May I suggest that you use the 'Give us Feedback' link from within your account requesting this as well?

So if you want this feature, login to adCenter and suggest it by clicking on "Give us Feedback."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Microsoft to Offer Cash Back to Users

Posted: May 21st, 2008, 5:03pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Microsoft Live Search April 2008 Update?

Posted: April 15th, 2008, 2:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

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.

Berkowitz Replaced By Lanzone at Microsoft

Posted: April 1st, 2008, 1:45pm CEST by Phoenix

Tags: Search MSN Microsoft

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.

Microsoft ContentAds Publisher Program Pilot Sign Up Form

Posted: March 31st, 2008, 2:42pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: ContentAds MSN

It seems like you can now request to join the pilot Microsoft ContentAds program as a publisher. Currently, there was really no public method to request to show Microsoft ContentAds, via the adCenter content network, on your site. But now, there appears to be a form at [advertising.microsoft.com] that you can sign up at.

By completing the form, you have a chance at:

To keep informed about new developments
Receive invitations to participate in focus groups or feedback sessions
And most importantly, possibly be considered for participation in an upcoming pilot program

So does this mean that Microsoft will soon be opening up their publisher program and be competing directly with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network? If Microsoft opens up the program soon, they can likely take away publishers from Yahoo. Yahoo is still closed to non-US based publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEO News » Tags » MSN

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108 items tagged "MSN"

Posted: October 29th, 2010, 3:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Posted: October 29th, 2010, 3:10pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: October 28th, 2010, 3:00pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Posted: October 14th, 2010, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: October 12th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: October 5th, 2010, 2:47pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 30th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Posted: September 29th, 2010, 10:15pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 22nd, 2010, 3:53pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 21st, 2010, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN Microsoft adCenter

Posted: September 15th, 2010, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 15th, 2010, 3:26pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 4:03pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: August 24th, 2010, 3:37pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: August 20th, 2010, 2:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: August 3rd, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: July 30th, 2010, 3:06pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: July 29th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: July 21st, 2010, 3:03pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: July 12th, 2010, 3:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: July 1st, 2010, 3:22pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 30th, 2010, 3:13pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 23rd, 2010, 2:50pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 4:02pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: MSN ContentAds

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 3:43pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 2:56pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: June 7th, 2010, 3:24pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 3:25pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: April 28th, 2010, 3:52pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 3:09pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 2:58pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 2:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:57pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 1:55pm CET by rustybrick