This is the second of three posts covering our presentations at SMX East last week. URLs are the foundation of the Internet. However, they can cause some significant problems for search engines due to the number of synonyms that are often automatically created for each piece of content. If there was only one thing I wanted the audience to take away from this presentation, it was that they should always create short, descriptive URLs, and redirect...
Read More

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...
Read More

Next week, October 6-8, the search community converges on Times Square for Search Marketing Expo East 2008. Danny Sullivan and his team have put together an educational schedule for this year’s SMX East, and the Live Search team is excited to be a part of it. As with every conference, representatives from Live Search and Microsoft Advertising will be on hand to help you learn practical tips and techniques to improve your search results, as...
Read More

I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to check out my session at Web 2.0 Expo here in New York City. I’ve included a link to my slides below, along with answers to all the questions that were posted that I did not get a chance to answer during the talk. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.   Advanced SEO for Web Developers View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: seo web)    ...
Read More

Just recently a strange problem came across my desk that I thought was worth sharing with you. A customer notified us that content from a site she was interested in was not showing up in our results. Wanting to understand why we may or may not have indexed the site, I took a look to see what the problem was and stumbled upon an interesting but a potentially very bad use of the robots.txt file. The first visit I made to the site had a very standard...
Read More

Last week I was at SES San Jose in the “Working Collaboratively with Your IT Dept” session with panelists Greg, Matt, Chris, and Sage, where someone asked which platform they should use for maximum SEO benefit. The answer from the panel was a resounding “Nothing from Microsoft.” While I don’t entirely agree with this advice, I thought it would be a great catalyst for feedback from the community on what we can do to...
Read More

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
Read More

As summer begins to wind down and kids are beginning to dread the sound of school bells ringing, there is one more chance for a little getaway: Search Engine Strategies, San Jose 2008. While we expect the California sun will be out and there will be plenty of margarita’s to go around, there will also be some really great sessions and speakers that those of you in search marketing won’t want to miss. So if you’re planning to be...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More