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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Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, 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) You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent. We...
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On the web, links are the coin of the realm and as such, it is probably one of the most talked about subjects in webmaster blogs and at search conferences. In the last few weeks, there have been a few blog posts and "link" related product launches that make it clear there are still some misconceptions about what are effective and beneficial ways to build links. Link building is one of the most important and difficult jobs for a webmaster...
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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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Last week at PubCon, I spoke on a panel titled Video Engines – New Kids Rocking the Web. The discussion focused on what was new in the online video space in production, optimization, and search. For those that weren’t there we felt it would be good to share the presentation and some additional information on video search. Be sure to run some of the demo queries you can find in the presentation below. Video Engines – New Kids...
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Are you attending SMX London? We are too!  Nathan Buggia, Senior Program Manager Lead for the Live Search Webmaster Center will be on hand presenting during several sessions and we hope that if you are in attendance that you will take the time to stop by and listen. You can find him speaking at: Day 1: Keynote  9:00 – 10:00 AM  : Empowering Search Marketers – The Next Generation Day 2:  Sessions 10:45...
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A big part of Web 2.0 is bringing the richness of desktop applications onto the Web, to create both a richer user experience and a stable development platform. With technologies like Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX), Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, we’ve made a lot of progress. As far as the Web has come, these technologies are still far from mature in realizing the promise to give modern developers and users the best of both...
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