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Posts Tagged ‘Bing’

Of late, people have been noticing changes in Google web search. So, is this Google web search update for August, 2009? Maybe! Over the last weekend people have noticed a few changes which they assume as a possible Google web search update. There are threads posted on this topic at DigitalPoint Forums and at WebmasterWorld.

In the WebmasterWorld thread, senior member BillyS (post number 3977195) said:

“We started to see some pretty big changes this morning.This appears to be a return to our pre-summer positions.”

However, Google's Matt Cutts commented below the post at Search Engine Roundtable that he was not aware of any update.

“I'm on vacation this week, but other than the Caffeine update, I'm not aware of any changes that would be noticed on a large scale. I'm happy to pass on example queries though if people want to point them out though.”

Forum discussion is going on at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Is Google Updating Web Search For August 2009?

Microsoft has released a new MSN Toolbar which is powered by Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, reported the Bing team on Twitter. Check out the new Toolbar at toolbar.msn.com.

Here is a screen capture:

A couple of days ago we reported the launch of Google Caffeine sandbox and about Google urging webmasters and power searchers to give their feedback on their new test index. The good news is that Matt McGee of Search Engine Land lets us know about two tools that allow webmasters or searchers compare results between the regular Google index and Google Caffeine.

Here are the two tools:

• Facesaerch Caffeine Compare: This tool from the makers of the facesaerch image search engine allows you to see both “old Google” results and Caffeine results side-by-side in frames. Below is a screenshot:
• The tool is easy to use as you do not require to click back and forth between two browser tabs or windows!
• Google Caffeine Bookmarklet: This is a browser bookmarklet, released yesterday only on The Google Tutor blog . It works as: do a search on Google.com, then click the Google Caffeine bookmarklet in your browser and it will automatically run the same search in the Caffeine sandbox!

With these available tools, Google seems to get much reviews on its new search index or what it has been hoping for!

In an attempt to encourage searchers to use Bing more, Microsoft has come up with a great idea recently. Microsoft announced a “Bing stimulus package”, which is a Cashback program as per which searchers will get cashback rewards as high as 50 percent upon purchasing products from select merchants. The cashback offer starts 10 August for a limited time.

Earlier, Microsoft had offered cashback up to 35 percent, but this time searchers are offered with almost double cashback as compared to before. To get the rewards, searchers out there need to search for what they are looking for at Bing. After entering your search, look for the Cashback rewards icon on the search ads. Then follow the steps as shown there in order to get up to 50 percent back.

Here is a screenshot of a search for “GPS Receiver”:

Over the past few months, discussions have been going on in the Webmaster Center Blog regarding how to optimize a site! Recently, Kristin Meldahl of Bing highlighted some of the recent information that the Webmaster Center team has published on optimizing site architecture in their SEM 101 column. The information appears to be useful to webmasters and web publishers. There are four recent posts that focuses on various aspects of site architecture optimization, such as file/page issues, links, content and page meta information. The posts are:

Site Architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101)

The series of posts is indeed very helpful and useful for webmasters. For more information on site optimization, keep visiting the Webmaster Center blog .

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

Bing has been having problems with its indexing. Just recently Brett Yount, Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center has responded to some complaints of incidences where MSNbot disregarded specific instructions not to index certain pages.

According to mckenzie MSNbot did not follow the Disallow instruction in his robots.txt file. Another user, jiosis, complained that MSNBot ignored the robots tag where he used the NoIndex/NoFollow attribute.

The good news is that Brett Yount says that they are already working on the problem although as of the moment it will be a good idea for everyone to start checking whether pages you want to stay hidden are being indexed by Bing or not. If you encounter the same problem there is no need to fill out a content removal request since, as Brett Yount says, it is a problem on Bing’s side. All you need to do is email Brett Yount at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line and send an explanation of your problem and any proof (if any) that MSNBot is indeed the one causing the problem. Note that even without any proof (if understood it correctly) they will still look into your problem, however, for expediency’s sake it would be better to provide them with helpful details such as clips of your log file.

As for getting Bing to not index pages using the hash #, I have yet to find a complaint.

And if you are having the opposite problem, which is puzzling over why your site isn’t being indexed by Bing, don’t worry because you are definitely not alone. Bing also has some kinks to iron out in that regard. Head to the Bing community forum to read the numerous complaints and solutions on the indexing issue.

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Bing Ignoring Instructions Not to Index Pages

After a July update less than two weeks ago, Bing seems to be updating again. Many webmasters are noticing a search results update on Microsoft'search engine. Some webmasters are reporting their experiences in a WebmasterWorld thread as follows:

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

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

Now, you know why it's happening if you are seeing an increase or decline in your referrers from Bing recently!

Forum discussion going on at WebmasterWorld.

Google is launching a rare commercial campaign in an attempt to boost the sales of its online business applications. The company is leasing billboards along major highways in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston in order to promote a set of business applications that sells for $50 per worker annually. The idea is to display a different message each weekday through August, starting with Monday morning’s commute.

Well, Google has been selling its applications package since 2007, however, it is now when the search giant realized the need of a more aggressive sales pitch. “People don’t necessarily think of Google when it comes to how we can help companies,” said Michael Lock, director of sales and operations for Google’s enterprise division in North America.

While Google is looking up to the newly launched ad campaign, it is keeping itself away from advertising its business applications in other offline media, such as magazines, newspapers, television or radio. With the billboard campaign Google aims at attracting corporate customers away from Microsoft Corp.’s e-mail service and industry-leading applications for word processing, spreadsheets and scheduling. Besides, it is also targeting IBM Corp. more or less.

Reportedly, with an attempt to challenge Google’s commanding lead in the online ad market, Microsoft had advanced a search partnership with Yahoo Inc. The latter has also upgraded its search engine June this year and renamed it Bing, which is being advertised in a $100 million marketing campaign. Contrary to this, Google has not bought advertising to promote its search engine ever since its inception nearly eleven years ago.

Google has always been confident about its word-of-mouth and free media exposure when it comes to establish its search engine as the Internet’s most powerful tool. For the first half of 2009, the advertising connected to the search engine is generating $10.7 billion in revenue. So, it can be said that the strategy proves beneficial for Google! Reportedly, software licensing, including Google’s sales of business applications and revenue from other non-advertising sales accounted for just $365 million in revenue during the same period.

After months of speculation, finally Yahoo and Microsoft search and online advertising deal is now official.

As per Yahoo’s Carol Bartz:

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development. Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities and mobile experiences.”

And Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has this to say:

“Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company. Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

The companies have also established a website at http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement.

From SEM and SEO point of view the key points to note are:

1. The deal will be complete by next year (2010) only.
2. Yahoo Publisher Network will probably be closed down. So we will only have adcenter and adwords to worry about.
3. Bing will become No.2 Search engine and by default Yahoo, Alltheweb, Altavista, Inktomi etc will be powered by Bing.
4. The deal will initially be for 10 years

More to come from the live conference which is happening right now. Read more at Yahoo! official blog: http://ycorpblog.com/2009/07/29/what-our-microsoft-deal-means-to-you