Lord Alfred Douglas once said, “All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.” He could have just as easily been talking about high-ranking websites (had he known about them — his quote pre-dates the 1920s!). The way to search engine optimization (SEO) success is neither fast nor simple (not that it has to be hard, though). But the accumulation of valuable, relevant, inbound links...
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We have another quick but important announcement today. Bing, along with the other search engines that are a part of Sitemaps.org, has announced support for the following Sitemap enhancements: 1. You can now include up to 50,000 references (either URLs or links to child Sitemaps) in your sitemap.xml index file. Until recently, Sitemap files only supported about 1,000 child references. This enhancement will be very useful to extremely large sites...
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Quick note on this. We have just released a new white paper titled, Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. As you might imagine, it covers the key features of Bing from the perspective of webmasters and web publishers. It also delves into how Bing affects your past and future SEO activities. Be forewarned – it is a bit long (I am a veteran tech writer, after all, and I like details and images to illustrate points). I hope you find it...
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Here at Microsoft, the fun is not just working on interesting projects but sharing interesting results across groups to help our users. And when this information exchange is in the area of security, you just feel elated that you have done the right thing. Thanks to our friends at Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), we were able to publish some interesting data analysis for the security community through Microsoft’s Security...
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In Bing, certain navigational queries will provide a “Best match” result at the top. This result also provides several deep links and various contact information associated with the site.  Currently, we are working to develop a better support experience for this feature. We hope to have it online within the next few weeks and we will make an announcement when the specific support is available. Meanwhile, if you need to make...
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This has been an excellent week in Webmaster Center. Our new Bing community forums are alive and vibrant with excellent questions and people who are willing to share their knowledge. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated. We look forward to your continued participation going forward! I’ve received a couple great questions on the forums lately and, although we have posted on a few of these...
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As you may have noticed, Bing is live today as a preview. The site will be fully deployed by Wednesday. Be sure to go to www.bing.com and check out for yourself all of the new features and functionality of the new search engine. It’s pretty cool stuff. We’re also excited to welcome you today to the new home of the Webmaster Center blog and forums, as part of the new Bing Community site. Welcome! The old URLs are now automatically...
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As you may have seen, Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing, Microsoft’s new search product today. Bing will begin rolling out internally to Microsoft employees today and will be unveiled to the public in the coming days. For more information on what Bing is all about, take a look at today’s post on the main Bing blog. So what does Bing mean to you as a webmaster? All good things; including an improved Webmaster Center with access to the tools...
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Let’s just say it. Content is king. There. It’s done. That’s everything you need to know about improving page rank, right? Well… Content may be king, but as in modern monarchies, the king may not be the sole authority. Parliaments now rule, and they are made up of many constituent parts of society. And while the quality of your site’s content can have a leading role in helping you optimize your site’s organic...
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In a blog post last month, we identified the preferred method for providing feedback on any Live Search crawler issues you may have experienced. We would like to thank everyone for taking the time to provide us with this feedback and let you know what we have done on our end. But first, a little background. Our crawler, MSNBot, performs many different functions. We have blogged about our cloaking detection in the past, so I’m not giving away...
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