A few weeks ago, we wrote a post addressing the often-asked question of how to remove a URL from the Live Search index. Since then, we’ve received many questions about the process and wanted to provide more details about the turn-around time for processing these requests.. The reason for removal can affect the time needed to do the work. We strive to process each removal request within 48 hours of acceptance. However, some requests require...
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One of the best parts of publishing online is that, on the Web, anyone can have a world-wide reach. But while being global is made easy on the Internet, ensuring that the content you produce will be found by the right audience can be a real challenge. Search engines can have trouble understanding geotargeting because of a few technical limitations. These include: Search engines may not be crawling your site from the location of your customers...
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One of the most common challenges search engines run into when indexing a website is identifying and consolidating duplicate pages. Duplicates can occur when any given webpage has multiple URLs that point to it. For example: URL Description http://mysite.com A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage. http://www.mysite.com However, you can add ‘www’ to most websites and still get the...
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Everyone knows great content is fundamental to the success of your site. It is the reason people are looking for your site and it is why they will stay. In the previous three posts from this series, we have discussed how large sites need to expose fewer URLs, how you can help search engines crawl more efficiently, and how not to unintentionally hide your content from crawlers.
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We’re excited to be headed to SMX West and participating in a number of panels and other events next week. We’ll be there to talk about all the usual searchy things you love and we will have plenty of folks (Nathan as well as a few new faces) on hand to help you with your Webmaster Center or search-related questions. If you have a specific question about your site, or you just want to meet the people who work on Live Search, be sure to...
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Working with large sites often means being a part of a large organization, which brings its own set of challenges. Many stakeholders with different agendas or needs influence how sites are structured. Within larger organizations, there are long to-do lists and a lack of understanding of the impact certain designs or architecture choices can have on the ability of the search engine to index the site. In our past two articles on large site...
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Working with large sites often means being a part of a large organization, which brings its own set of challenges. Many stakeholders with different agendas or needs influence how sites are structured. Within larger organizations, there are long to-do lists and a lack of understanding of the impact certain designs or architecture choices can have on the ability of the search engine to index the site.
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We are taking a quick time-out on our series on large site optimization to provide feedback on a question we are getting asked frequently in the Webmaster Center forum. Site owners want to control which content gets indexed. We have worked hard to ensure that we follow and respect the Robots Exclusion Protocol as directed in your robots.txt file.
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For the large website, there are many critically important issues in optimizing for search. In Part 1 of this series of posts, we discussed the importance of reducing the number of URLs you expose through canonicalization. But there are other ways to reduce the surface area of your site to search engines and focus on pages that matter.
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At Live Search, one of the most common questions we receive from our peers at microsoft.com and msn.com is how to optimize their sites for search. But microsoft.com is unlike most other sites on the Internet. It is huge, containing millions of URLs, and is growing all the time. However, large content sites like microsoft.com and msn.com are not the only sites that can have an infinite number of URLs. There are also large ecommerce sites and...
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