'Net Features : webmasters

Honey Badger: Bing Webmaster Tools

Administrator — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:30:00 GMT

Bing announced several updates to its Webmaster Tools platform. The name of the update is Honey Badger to those playing along at home (more on that below). Let's look at some of the new features and why they will prove important to successful SEO at Bing (and perhaps even Yahoo!).

- Webmasters can now ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours or crawl faster during off-peak hours. This configurable crawl delay is a unique and interesting feature for those concerned with site performance.

- Bing has also rewritten its Index Tracker (the area most SEOs will spend time). The backend has been repurposed to showcase freshness and performance. The best part? New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they sign up.

- Finally, Bing has finally added user/role management. Site owners can grant administrative privileges (read/write, or read-only access) to others users, and even grant certain users access to subdomains or subfolders.

Kudos to Bing on the moniker of this update to BWT being Honey Badger. The honey badger or ratel is a tenacious small carnivore that has a reputation for being, pound for pound, Africa's most fearless animal despite its small size. It is even listed as the "most fearless animal in the world" in the 2002 Guinness Book of Records.

When your prey is Google, you'll need to be as fearless as a honey badger.

Sample of the configurable crawl delay within Bing Webmaster Tools:

Bing Webmaster Tools – New Inbound Link Feature

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:27:00 GMT

Bing announced the release of a new Inbound Link feature into its Webmaster Tools offering. The feature provides registered site owners the ability to retrieve data about links pointing to their sites.

As you might imagine, Bing received numerous requests for the feature and it’s excellent to see the search engine acting upon those recommendations as it is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization professionals to understand how their sites are being ranked on Bing and its affiliated sites. While it falls short of what Google provides in Webmaster Central it is definitely a step in the right direction.

The functionality includes an ability to understand the number of inbound links over a period of time to a site, the number of inbound links by page including URL and Anchor Text details and an option to export link data for analyzing offline.

Google Opens Up, Answers Some Pressing Questions

Mike Phillips — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:56:00 GMT

Matt Cutts and other prominent Google folk recently held a live Q&A session, aimed at addressing important questions from Web professionals. The full discourse is extensive. What follows are some points of interest, including dedciated vs. shared IPs, article directories and 301 redirects. You can see the entire conversation here. I think what's important to look for, aside from concrete answers, is the tone of the answers. That can give you a good idea of how Google feels "behind the scenes."

Does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by Google?

Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings :-) Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger.

How often does your search algorithm change?

We change the algorithms all the time - last year we had over 450 changes.

What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?

I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.

Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more "link juice" than the common back link?

This is a common misconception--you don't get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you're not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn't have any PageRank.

JohnMu: We generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?

In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it's hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you'd see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.

If you're thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it's nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

Does 301 Redirect move the Google Page Ranking to the new location? If so how long does it take for this to take effect?

Where appropriate, ranking signals will be transferred across 301 redirects (if the same page has moved from one URL to another). This may take some time, so you should probably leave the redirect in place as long as you have control over the URL. That way any new links will make our crawler follow the 301.

Will it make any difference between a shared IP and a dedicated IP on SEO or search results, as opinions are divided on this aspect?

Most of the web is on shared IP addresses, so it doesn't make much sense for us to give those on dedicated IP addresses any advantages. That said, if your server is struggling with the load of your website, it might make sense to move to a dedicated server that helps to make sure that your users are happy when visiting your website.

Update to Live Search Webmaster Tools

Administrator — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:47:00 GMT

Microsoft made some significant updates to its Webmaster Tools which will provide webmasters with information on how their sites are being crawled and indexed.

Those that use the Live Search Webmaster tools will be able to find four types of issues, including 404 errrors (File Not Found), Blocked by REP, Long Dynamic URL, and identify unsupported content types. For each issue, the URL and the data encountered is returned.

Users of the solution will also be able to get more and better backlink data, something Google Webmaster Central users have had for quite a long time and which keeps getting better.

Microsoft Webmaster Tools is also making data more "actionable" with advanced filtering (for example, filter backlinks by domain, subdomain or subfolder) and data downloads (option to download the first 1,000 results in a CSV file) which can be imported into Excel or a custom reporting tool to assit in the analysis of results.

Kudos to the Live Search Webmaster Tools team. I know many SEO's that have been clamoring for more data from Microsoft for a long time and these enhancements show that they've listened by returning a better, much deeper solution. While it's not yet at the level of Google Webmaster Central, it's surpassed Yahoo Site Explorer in functionality and ease of use.