For webmasters who work hard to build and publish their sites, it can be frustrating when their sites are barely indexed and rank poorly across all search engines. They may think, "Why does this happen? What can I do to improve this?"
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Today’s installment of the From the Forums column involves a user who had difficulties getting the required authentication code installed on the default page of her website so she could take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Center tools. The customized authentication code issued by Bing Webmaster Center ensures that only the site owner who registered with Webmaster Center can get access to the detailed information about the site as...
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The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can’t wait to share with you (patience, Grasshopper – all will be revealed in time). But the blog waits for no one (well, that’s the intent, anyway). From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it’s that time again. So let’s get to it. Q: I...
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When a key opens a lock, it typically provides the key’s holder with a clear path to where he or she wants to go. Keywords and key phrases do the same for a website. They help direct searchers to content they wish to see on the Internet. But there is a key difference: whereas a lock key will typically match up with only one lock, keywords can lead a searcher down multiple paths to many matching, relevant websites. It is a filtering process...
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In August, we alerted webmasters to the news from the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team of the beta 1 release of their excellent new tool, the IIS SEO Toolkit. The public response we received was very enthusiastic and supportive. In response to many requests, we followed that up with a more detailed article explaining how the new tool is installed as an extension of IIS 7. Since that time, the tool was refreshed in a beta 2...
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We still get many questions in our blog comments, even though we try to encourage our readers to post their questions to our Webmaster Center forums (which are actually staffed to answer your questions!). I do look through the blog comments every day and delete those that are junk (those that are empty, duplicated, offensive, and overtly spammy – see our Q&A reply on why blog comments are deleted in the 1st Webmaster Center blog Q&A...
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In past SEM 101 articles, we’ve talked about the importance of inbound links to successful ranking (see “Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” – Part 1 and Part 2). We’ve already discussed many issues surrounding them, but we haven’t done a dedicated post on how to be successful at link building from a search engine’s perspective. Let’s finally address that omission here and now. What is the point...
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Did you hear the news? Bing was recently upgraded with another set of exciting end-user features. Instead of reciting the long list of changes here, I’ll just point you to the blog post in the Bing Search blog titled, “Bing’s Next Chapter Begins Today.” The Bing engineering team has been focused on improving the already cool features that have made using Bing so much fun. One edit to the Bing home page has changed the way...
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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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About eight months back, the Microsoft Research Translator team delivered an entirely unique way of delivering your website’s pages to visitors who speak a different language with no development effort on your part. Unlike any other translation widget/gadget available at that time, the Translator widget was unique in that it kept your audience on your site, rather than redirecting them to a proxy translation service. Since then, thousands of...
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