Here’s their introduction to the new search engine: Bing
Looks good, but will it be able to oust Google? A lot of the stuff it’s talking about has already started to appear in Google, and to be honest, I don’t see anything that hasn’t been done before.
The folks over at AdAge are reporting that Microsoft are set to launch an advertising campaign costing anywhere between $80 million and $100 million. Compare that with Google who spent $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Of course, not all that was spent on promoting it’s search engine, some $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting.
AdAge seem confident that the new engine will be called Bing, and not Kumo as has been previously touted, although there doesn’t seem to be any discussion of why this name was chosen. Regardless of what it is called, Microsoft face an uphill struggle in shifting the balance of power in the fight for our searches, and throwing such a large amount of money at an advertising campaign shows how seriously MS are taking the issue. Whether they’ll be any more successful than all the previous off-line campaigns is anyone’s guess, but the news made me think of past campaigns by search companies begging for our traffic. I did a little bit of searching on youtube to see what I could find, and discovered this gem of a compilation created by the good folk at SearchEngineLand.
The first thing I noticed is the number of now defunct search engines, which should be a sobering thought for the Microsoft team.
Recently the Irish online business directory, www.whatswhat.ie, has become aware of an aggressive campaign by a UK SEO company targeting Irish SMEs by falsely offering the companies improved rankings in Google’s SERPs. Hundreds of businesses listed in the directory have been contacted by this company which claims to be working on Google’s behalf. The essence of the offer is that when a company discloses its credit card details, it will jump up the rankings in Google within 48 hours.
Whatswhat contacted Google, who confirmed that the UK company’s claims are completely false, responding with the following statement
“We’re extremely concerned to learn of companies without affiliation to Google using our name to mislead or mistreat small businesses who want to advertise online. Our legal team investigates such abuses and we continue to work with the relevant authorities to combat the problems caused. We always urge businesses in the UK and Ireland to work only with agencies they know and trust. We have established a programme of Authorised Google AdWords Resellers whom businesses can trust to manage their advertising on Google. Alternatively, they can do this directly with us at adwords.google.com.”
This piece of news was first published at www.irishpressreleases.ie but unfortunately it makes no effort to name and shame the company involved, which is a real shame. If anyone out there has been approached by this company, we’d love to hear about it here at Avatar Web Solutions.
We’re almost a week into May, and still waiting for the launch of new “fact based” search engine, Wolfram Alpha. Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny O’Sullivan has put together a decent preview of how the new engine will work, and what kind of results you can expect from it. According to Danny, it looks impressive, and I can’t wait to try it out. When it launches, which should be very soon.
As the number of Twitter users continues to grow at pace, it’s no surprise that new ways of searching the content continue to be developed. Whether real-time search will eventually overtake regular search is debatable, but the number of new sites providing a method of searching and filtering Tweets is impressive. Of course, Twitter Search itself is growing in popularity, but there are a couple of new kids on the block beginning to make a name for themselves.
One of the newcomers is Twazzup, which provides a list of related tweets on the left of the page, and on the right has sections for the most popular tweets, the Top Trendmakers whose accounts are driving conversation, related photos from Twitpic, and the most popular links that are included in tweets related to the keyword. Like Twitter Search, there appears to be quite a lot of ‘noise’, and the user needs to skim over a lot of entries to find what they’re looking for, but the most popular links section can be very helpful. The most popular tweets section needs a little work, for some of the searches I used to test the engine with spammy tweets appeared. Apart from that, the experience is quite good, and the layout easy to deal with, and overall it should prove to be a decent addition to the real-time search engine field.
Perhaps a little more interesting is One Riot, a real-time search engine which indexes tweets, locates the embedded links within them, and then indexes the content that is linked to. This is designed to remove the ‘noise’ and provide the user with much more relevant results. Their algorithm filters spam, checks for relevance, timeliness, and a factor for URLs that are being talked about a lot in recent tweets. Content is the focus - the URLs people are discussing and sharing on Twitter. Each result includes a reference to how recently the URL was shared on Twitter, how many tweets mention it, and who first found it on Twitter.
There was a recent post over on the MSN Live Search Webmaster Centre Blog outlining steps for first discovering whether your site has been penalised, and then how to go about getting things fixed. The good folk at Live Search believe that most webmasters are going to know why they have been blocked, summed up here: “They’ve used a myriad of overly aggressive (and often outright malicious) SEO techniques to try to egregiously manipulate their website’s position in search engine rankings. They often go to extraordinary lengths in an effort to game the system rather than do the legitimate work necessary to compete fairly for their page rank.” ( Note: Live Search Page Rank??? Is there such a thing? Apparently, yes).
The blog post is not concerned about the black hats, but is directed towards “those folks who were working hard and trying to do what was right for their businesses by innocently but actively optimizing their sites who got dinged.”
The first step is to discover whether your site has been penalised, which will require the authentication of the site, is to go the Webmaster Center and check the site status in the summary section. If it says “Blocked - Yes”, you’ve got trouble. Having confirmed that the site is indeed blocked, you can now check to see if the problem has been caused by malware.
“In Webmaster Center, check out both the Crawl Issues tool (review the Malware infected issue type) and the Outbound Links tool (select the Show only outbound links to malware option) for possible malware issues. If any malware issues were detected, clean them up immediately.”
If not, then you have more than likely got a lot of work to do. You’ll have to review the Webmaster Guidelines, where special attention should be paid to the bullet items listed in ‘Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results. These are the basic rules, and breaking any one of them can cause your site to be penalised. Once you have identified and fixed the problem, you can go to the Live Search Support page and request re-inclusion. Your request will then be reviewed, and your site scheduled to be re-crawled. If the crawler determines that the issues have been resolved, your site will be added back into the index.
One part of the post I particularly found informative was the bullet list of things the penalised site may have done to warrant exclusion, especially as each point begins with the correct way and moves through all the gradually worse techniques.
There have been a couple of developments in Social Media over the last month or so, neither appearing terribly important at the time, but when looked at together may prove a pointer to the future of social media. The first was the widely reported acquisition of Summize by Twitter, leading to a powerful search tool on Twitter itself. Previously, Twitter had offered the service “Track”, but this hadn’t be a success, possibly because it didn’t work. Often. A number of news emails arrived in my basket, and a number of them referred to articles suggesting that Twitter would become a main rival of Google. I’m not 100% convinced, to be honest. I’m not what you might call an avid tweeter, possibly because I doubt too many people care if I’m stuck in traffic, or not having a donut with my coffee. I am an avid reader of tweets, possibly because other people lead more interesting lives. But mostly because people like Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly and Jill Whalen are keen tweeters, and a link in one of their tweets has a very good chance of teaching me something new.
So, although I don’t post too often there, I pop in regularly, and am a part of that tweeting community, yet I don’t see how Twitter is going to have too significant an impact on Google in the near future. This is for one main reason: the different search facilities will be used for different reasons. Twitter will search all it’s own community for the terms entered, and filter results accordingly, but it requires that whatever being searched for is already in the Twitter world. Of course, as more and more users join that community, the greater in size it’s index will become. Twitter is a microblogging platform, which means that each tweet is restricted to 140 characters, and must link to an external site if more information than that needs to be given. I can see how it will develop as a search tool for very recent news (the Hudson plane crash appeared on Twitter before it appeared on any online news source), and for recent product or service news, but as a general search engine for information it will be hard to match the sheer size of the Google index. I doubt Google are too worried at present, but I expect they will be keeping a very close eye on developments there.
The second bit of news to grab the attention was the changes made in the Facebook layout. Essentially, Facebook decided to mimic Twitter, and reformat the home pages of all its users to display, a la Twitter, the news feeds from friends in each user’s network. Facebook has seen some incredible growth since its inception, but has nevertheless struggled to find a means to match profitability to its growth, and this might be a first step in that direction. One of the main changes is that Facebook now allows the user to update their pages with their Twitterfeed, more proof if any were needed of the intertwining of development in social media applications.
Google’s Matt Cutts has provided a nice video and an explanatory slide show to help webmasters understand the new tag better. So, pop over to the Matt Cutts Blog to get the low down.
One of the curses of the t’interweb is that of duplicate content. Search engines hate it, but for some online businesses it’s impossible to avoid, especially those sites that allow visitors to sort search results. So when Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all announced that they were uniting to provide a method to reduce duplicate content, there was much rejoicing in the webmaster world. And now they’ve been joined by Ask.com. You can catch the Matt Cutts interview on the subject over at WebProNews
Using the tag couldn’t be simpler, you simply specify the canonical version in the head section of the duplicate content pages:
Google has so far not made it’s use a directive, rather the search engines use this as a hint, a “suggestion that we honor strongly” is how they put it, but are more likely to use it if the URLs use best practices, such as:
The content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
The canonical URL is the shortest version
The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)
It is interesting to hear Matt highlight the other methods of cutting down on duplicate content, especially through the use of sitemaps. Correctly structuring your xml sitemap for Google also helps you to educate the spider on the order of importance of a site’s pages to YOU, so it is something I recommend to every client.
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