Life can be cruel. You work hard to create new and compelling content for your site. You’ve studied legitimate SEO techniques. Everything is going well and your site is getting decent page rank scores across the board. Then it hits. A search engine penalty comes out of nowhere and knocks your site out of the index. Talk about a bad day. To be honest, most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened. They’ve used a myriad of...
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In August, we shipped the largest update to Live Search Webmaster Center tools since we launched the site over a year ago. In that update, we committed that we would continue to bring you important updates and resources designed to make your life as a site owner easier. Today, we are happy to announce that we have shipped several new features, which continue to build on the work we have done. Fix issues on your site In our August release, we...
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Updated: SMX has posted the video for the What is Spam session.  One of the most common questions I get from companies concerned about search engine optimization (SEO) is which optimization tactics are acceptable by search engines and which ones are not. We pulled this session together with the help of Danny Sullivan and SMX to provide a definitive answer to that question and help clarify any misconceptions that the audience might have. This...
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Thank you all for coming to our presentation at SES San Jose. We’ve posted the deck online for folks who are interested. If you have any questions, please post them to our forums. Diagnose SEO Issues with Live Search Webmaster Tools View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: seo) — Nathan Buggia, Webmaster Team
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In 2007, we shut off the linkdomain attribute in the advanced query syntax, but promised to make link data available to you as soon as possible. Last fall when we launched the initial beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center, we offered a limited look into backlink data. But we soon realized that for you to be successful, you really need more and better backlink data. That’s why we’re really excited about the updates that we a have...
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My favorite feature of our recent launch is the Crawl Issues tool, which gives you details about issues Live Search may encounter while crawling and indexing your website. This information can help you better understand what Live Search sees when crawling your site and should ultimately help you improve your results from Live Search. We report four types of issues: File not found (404) errors – reported when Live Search encountered a...
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Creating websites and publishing on the web is getting simpler and simpler all the time, but with more content on the web it is becoming harder for webmasters and publishers to ensure that their content can be found. Last fall when we launched the Live Search Webmaster Center in beta, the goal was to establish a long term relationship with webmasters and help them achieve their goals by addressing the most common questions we hear, and help them...
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If you’re the owner of a large website with lots of content, you’ve probably noticed that up to 10% of your traffic ends up on a “webpage not found” error page due to broken links or misspelled URLs. There are a lot of reasons users who visit your site might reach a 404 page, but how do you keep those customers from abandoning your site? Today we’re announcing the Web Page Error Toolkit, a customizable web...
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Today we’re pleased to announce several improvements in the crawler for Live Search that should significantly improve the efficiency with which we crawl and index your web sites. We are always looking for ways to help webmasters, and we hope these features take us a few more steps in the right direction. HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing...
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Today we’re happy to take the “private” label off our Webmaster Tools beta, and open it up to all webmasters and SEO professionals. This is a first step by Live Search to make it easier to ensure your site is getting the best crawling, indexing, and representation in Live Search results possible. Our goal is that it will lead to better traffic for your site, and better search results for our customers. In addition to the tools...
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