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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

Life can be cruel. You work hard to create new and compelling content for your site. You’ve studied legitimate SEO techniques. Everything is going well and your site is getting decent page rank scores across the board. Then it hits. A search engine penalty comes out of nowhere and knocks your site out of the index. Talk about a bad day. To be honest, most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened. They’ve used a myriad of...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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.
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More