The Search Engine Blog

Archive for the ‘MSN’ Category

Users are reporting issues submitting sites to Bing’s Webmaster tools site. Users are reporting “We could not find the page you requested.” messages.
Bing – Can’t add website… – Bing Community

Now that Yahoo! is serving up Bing results, the question is, are you Bing-abled? Together Yahoo! and MSN’s Bing comprise about 30% of the market. Being optimized for Google only is no longer an option. Ever since the talk of MSN and Yahoo! merging, I’ve been paying attention to having my customer’s sites MSN friendly. It was a guess that is paying off. Now that it’s official for ten years, how is your site doing?
SEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now | SearchViews – Daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO by Reprise Media.

Search engines fluctuate, but this seems bigger than normal. Multiple forums have users posting some odd results for both Google and Bing (MSN’s new search). If your search results and site rankings are wonky, this could be why.
Has Bing Updated?

Microsoft Live is being replaced with Bing. It’s suppose to be an intelligent search. You can limit by category, preview pages, etc.

Microsoft Corporation

It’s not Live, it’s Kumo. Microsoft is testing a new search engine code named Kumo. Is it just lipstick on a pig or will this Johnny come lately finally be able to steal some market share?

http://kumo.com/

The big 3 announced support for internal duplicate content. If you have a site with more than one way to get to a page, there is a new method for declaring the correct page. Simple to do in Miva Merchant, and probably other programs, the tag doesn’t have to be followed of course. Perhaps in the future the search spiders will restrict themselves. Think of it as a 301 redirect.

There are already Wordpress and other plugins to automate this process (I told you it was simple) and there are bound to be others jumping on board. Not earth shattering and some are skeptical, but well worth a read.

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

At the end of February, MSN Groups will be no more, instead recommending that you migrate to Multiply. Gee, MSN had a groups feature? <smile>

Community Feedback

The new Microsoft commercial get’s points for being really annoying. It isn’t funny and hasn’t any point. What are they trying to sell? Shoes? Club memberships? Personally I never found Seinfeld to be very funny. Kind of like this commercial, I thought the sit-com was annoying and pointless.

The point of this is that this commercial is getting a lot of buzz. Why is Microsoft spending $300 million on this series of commercials? Simple. It’s getting a lot of buzz. It seems everyone is writing about it including me. The old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” is certainly true here. So, have you released any videos that promote your business. You can’t do any worse than this and you can certainly do it for less money. I’d love to see some great spoofs on this commercial. Any takers?

YouTube – Shoe Circus – Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates

MSN has an update to their keyword tool where they claim you can “more efficiently find keywords and plan campaigns in adCenter”. Always love improvements but like with all updates, keep a cautious eye on the numbers. Remember they make money from convincing you to advertise more but must balance this with providing a useful tool that you can trust. Let’s hope there’s lots of the latter.

Updates to adCenter keyword research tools – adCenter Blog for Advertisers

Photosynth lets you create 3D views of anything by stringing together a lot of photos you have taken. A terrific tool for giving someone a complete view of something you have for sale or just showing off your home decor. Have a home for sale, a bed and breakfast or high dollar merchandise for sale? This seems like a perfect solution. It requires an 8mb download, a fast Internet connection and a Windows Live account. People do have to download the viewer to see your creations, a bit of a negative, but then many will if you sell them on viewing the cool new feature.