Gang, we’ve got a quick note here to alert users to an item we’ll be shutting down in 60 days. As of April 4th, 2011 we will discontinue support for the bing.com/siteowner functionality.  If you continue to leverage the feature after this date (April 4th, 2011), users who attempt to query in the search box will be redirected to a 404 page.  This means that you will need to move to the Bing API in order to continue to receive...
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This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review (Part 1), then took an initial look at page-level issues (Part 2), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues (Part 3), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site...
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In this blog, we’ve previously discussed matters relating to custom 404 pages in Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations (SEM 101), returning the correct HTTP status code with your custom 404 pages in 301 to 404 gets 200 – oops! (From the Forums), and using Bing toolkits to develop such pages in Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS. Earlier this week we announced one of the results of our recent collaboration with Cal Evans, PHP...
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In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away. The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question. It was soon...
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Microsoft Silverlight is a transformative technology. It enables otherwise basic websites to act as full-blown applications, provides access to state-of-the-art animation and video rich media presentations, and takes full advantage of your development team’s existing experience in standard programming languages, such as C#. However, there is one little problem. Like competing rich Internet application (RIA) technologies that present images,...
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You’ve seen it. So have I. Nearly every person who has actively browsed the Web for more than 15 minutes has seen it. I’m talking about the dreaded 404 File Not Found error. When it occurs, users simply abandon their search on that site and go elsewhere. That’s a potential lost sale, subscription, or download opportunity (aka conversion) for the affected site! It has been estimated that up to 10% of traffic to large websites on...
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I guess you can’t RT useful and interesting blog articles as easily as you can tweets, so I’m writing here today to pass on the latest news from our teammates in the Bing Developer Center. They’ve just released the updated Bing API Web Page Error Toolkit. I’ll be talking about custom 404 error pages on this blog soon, but for those who want a head-start on the subject, be sure to check out the Developer Center blog post...
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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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