April 14, 2008

Microsoft To Use Domain Age in SEO Ranking

Our industry's leading authority on search patents Bill Slawski found another interesting patent submission. Apparently Microsoft is looking at, if not using, domain age as an algorithm factor.

This has been discussed in conversations in many forums and no doubt this new information will start them up again.

The idea that new domains will have to overcome this hurdle is a factor that marketers will have to consider when developing sites. Also the impact of inbound links based on age of referring sites will also come into play.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:04 PM | Permalink

November 30, 2006

Microsoft On How To Let MSNBot In, Keep Bad Bots Out

The Live Search Blog described how you can verify if the MSNBot you see crawling your site, is truly the MSNBot from Microsoft or some rogue spider trying to steal your content. Microsoft has added a way to look up the reverse DNS information for the IP of the bot and described what you should see, to ensure that it is the official MSNBot, if it is not, then you may want to block it or report it to Microsoft. A step by step guide is at the Live Search Blog.

What about Googlebot? We covered that here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:01 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Link Exchanges Are Spam Links According To Microsoft

The other day I reported that Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges, where I uncovered an email sent to a Webmaster. The email stated that a particular site was removed from the Live.com Search index because the site was "acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content." The email also added that these types of links are "spam links," and is the reason the site was delisted from the index.

It struck me that this is why Google and Yahoo remain very vague when telling Webmasters why their sites are deindexed or penalized. Simply, people may look at this email and figure that exchanges links with your friends is a bad thing. If you have a personal blog about your life and you wanted to link to your dad's dental practice web site, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you do run huge link exchanges, then you need to be worried. The email sent to this Webmaster might not be clear enough to explain the difference, and get other Webmasters worried.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

MSN Assigns Names To Vertical Search Crawlers

I covered news at my blog this morning that MSN has assigned names to all their robots or crawlers. When MSN Search first launched, they had one robot named, msnbot. MSNbot did the work of all, from normal web search to image search to news and images. Now, MSN has clarified the roles and assigned names to each robot.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products, the MSN News bot is msnbot-news, the MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media and the MSN Search bot is still msnbot. This is important for SEOs, now you can define in your robots.txt file if you want msnbot-media to index your images or not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:53 AM | Permalink

June 29, 2006

MSN Search Requires Unique Robots.txt Files In HTTPS Vs. HTTP Cases

A quick note from the MSN Search Blog on secure content that https and http are considered separate "from a robots.txt perspective and requires its own robots.txt file." Nothing more to add here, but thought some of you would like to know this bit of information.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:10 AM | Permalink

June 26, 2006

MSN Talks Spam Defenses; Takes Weekends Off From Indexing

This morning I uncovered two threads at WebmasterWorld that provide information on MSN from spam defense to when search indexes get updated. The first is named MSN Asks Webmasters, What is Spam? where MSNdude provides some insights into how MSN determines what is spam, what are junk pages and determining the "hierarchy of spam." The second is named MSN Won't Do a Search Index Update on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays where we see MSNdude posting that normally MSN will not conduct a search index update on Saturdays and Sundays, and also they are unlikely to conduct an update on Fridays, because it may affect their weekends.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:43 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible

Threadwatch reveals some more examples of issues Google is having. They note a search on queer forum returns CraigsList 97 times out of the top 100 results. That is not all, a search on wedding forum returns about 50 of 100 results from CraigsList's site, just scroll down to number 50 and you will see.

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:19 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

Search Engine Optimization For New MSN Search

In our SEO for MSN thread in the forums, members are looking at the new MSN Search site and discussing what seems best to improve rankings there. Looking for tips or want to contribute? Stop by!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:59 AM | Permalink

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