'Net Features : live search

Yahoo! Gains Ground in Search Advertising

Mike Phillips — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:27:00 GMT

AdGooroo has released their Search Engine Advertising Update for Q1, and the findings are positive for Yahoo! The report finds that Yahoo! is gaining some ground in the paid advertising marketplace. According to the report, Yahoo! saw a 10 percent increase in active first-page advertisers over the first three months of 2009. The increase appears to come mostly at the expense of Live Search which, in February 2009, saw a whopping 30 percent drop in first-page advertisers. It also suggests that Yahoo! is back in the game, and perhaps it's time to shift some ad spend to the perennial runner-up in the search engine races.

Some other notable findings include:

Yahoo! leads the way with the average number of ads per keyword (US only) - 6.05 as of March 2009. Google is next with 5.44 and MSN is third with 3.92.
Ad results are boom-or-bust. About 42 percent of Google keywords contain no ads, while 15 percent have ten or more ads. Only 18 percent of Yahoo! keywords displayed no ads.
Since December 2008, Yahoo! has gained 6.5 percent in market share of all advertisers, while Google has lost 0.9 percent and MSN lost 4 percent (US and international).

The findings also see the travel industry stepping up its advertising, as is normal for this time of year, and a big increase in spending from BankOfAmerica and car resellers.

The full report is offered with site registration.

Optimizing Large Sites

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:48:00 GMT

If you are responsible for optimizing a very large site (I've had this challenge personally), then you know that you make big changes (not small SEO modifications on a per page basis) and hope that best practices established by watching the success of others will apply to you as well. We're not talking about cases of sites with hundreds or even thousands of pages, but from hundreds of thousands of pages and more.

Jeremiah Andrick from the Microsoft Live Search blog posted yesterday about how to optimize for large sites, and there are some excellent lessons for anyone responsible for SEO. The first tip he offered up was canonicalization, also known as normalization - the concept of only exposing URL per piece of content to the engines.

Here are a few other tips for optimizing large sites:

Add or remove the trailing /
- http://www.mysite.com/ to http://www.mysite.com
Remove the index or default
- http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com
- http://www.mysite.com/en/us/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com/en/us
Avoid CamelCase — convert your text to lower case
- http://www.mysite.com/FooBar/ to http://www.mysite.com/foobar
Remove query string variables or rewrite to readable URLs
- http://www.mysite.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99&displaylang=en to http://www.mysite.com/downloads/en/family/ab99
Remove Port Numbers
- http://www.mysite.com:8080/ to http://www.mysite.com
Avoid exposing secure HTTPS version
- https://www.mysite.com/en/us/ to http://www.mysite.com/en/us

Andrick also recommends 301 redirects, using a consistent linking convention, avoiding linking to multiple versions of a page, and using absolute links. To read all of Andricks' recommendations, click here.

New MSN Crawler and Index Update

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week on Microsoft's Webmaster Center Blog, the Live Search team announced that it will be testing an update to MSNBot (the company's official site crawler), which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

If you take a look at your raw server logs, you will still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent.

Many webmasters are seeing results from different data centers, and Live has been rotating different indexes in and out as recently as yesterday. This could mean that the crawlers represent two completely different algorithms. Whether this ultimately will improve relevancy at Live.com or any of the Microsoft Search properties is anyone's guess. It is probably safe to say that the damage has been done, so don't expect your MSN traffic stats to shoot up any time soon. Remember, this is all about users, and Microsoft has a long way to go to steal back its share of global searches from Google and Yahoo.

Live Search Adds Malware Reporting

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:29:00 GMT

Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Center Team announced that its updated tool now shows if any malware is found associated with your site.

As Live Search crawls the Web, it flags all pages containing or linking to detected malware with a “Malware” warning message in the search engine results page and disables the link to the page to protect customers. This enables website owners to determine whether any malware has been detected on an of their webpages and download offline-acessible repotis which detail the webpages that are affected by the detected malware. The Webmaster Center team is also now providing the ability to filter outbound links to see those that might specifically link to pages infected with malware. By reviewing this list and removing the bad links, site owners can prevent the users of a site from accidentally installing software that is harmful.

Microsoft has also made it easer for webmasters to authenticate their sites. The Webmaster Center team has simplified the authentication process by allowing one authentication code for all of your sites.

Free Stuff: Add Listings to Live Search Maps

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:01:00 GMT

Microsoft announced the ability to add listings to Live Search Maps via the Live Search Local Listings Center.

To add your listing to Live Search Maps, you will first need to verify that the business is not already listed. Once you're sure you're business is not included, then your business listing needs to be associated with a Windows Live ID (which can be a cumbersome process if you don't already have one set up).

The next step is to enter in all the information about your business listing, including contact information, phone numbers and addresses, hours of operation, payment methods accepted, professional contacts, etc. Then you will need to select what business categories you can associate your listing with. Up to 6 (based in order of priority) can be selected. This is an important step as it helps Microsoft determine your relevance to user queries (business owners even have the opportunity to add keywords to improve search result relevance).

Once you have completed all the necessary listing information, it's time to place your business on the map. Using the Virtual Earth platform, business owners are able to pinpoint their location - even drag the locator pin to the proper location if it is inaccurately placed.

For those interested in leveraging every local Web opportunity, this is important and should be taken seriously.

Live Search Cashback From Microsoft

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:19:00 GMT

Microsoft announced a new search service and advertising model yesterday which is receiving an immense amount of attention in both the Web user and Internet advertising space. Live Search Cashback is based at least in part on technology developed by JellyFish, which Microsoft acquired in 2007. (See Website Magazine's previous coverage of Jellyfish and 14 other comparison and social shopping engines here)

When Web users sign up for an account and buy items found using Microsoft's Live Search Cashback site, they will receive a percentage of the purchase price deposited into an account. When the total reaches $5, those shoppers can redeem the "cash". The solution essentially enables users to compare and sort products by the bottom-line price. Once users find the deal they are looking for, they go directly to the merchant site. The real benefit for users is taht every bought during that visit will be eligible for the Live Search Cashback program.

The draw for ecommerce advertisers will certainly be strong (the advertising model is a cost-per-sale offering). At a fixed CPA, Microsoft should expect some significant interest from the paid search advertising community - couple that with pretty established consensus that Microsoft Search already yields a high conversion rate against search engine rivals Google and Yahoo! when it comes to retail ecommerce, and in my opinion you've got a legitimate solution which could make Microsoft's Live Search a genuine consideration for ecommerce merchants.