LIVE SEARCH WEBMASTER CENTER GAINS CRAWL ERROR & BACKLINK REPORTS:

Webmaster center has launched a new data on august 6th called crawl error & back link reports. The below information tells how the site owners can use the launched data.

Last fall when webmaster center launched the Live Search Webmaster Center in beta, the goal was to establish a long term relationship with webmasters and help them achieve their goals by addressing the most common questions we hear, and help them understand how Live Search sees their site. In an effort to improve upon those goals, today they’ve have launched a significant update to our Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta! This update includes several new features that provide webmasters more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing their sites, as well as a few features to make the data more actionable.

Crawl issues & reports:

The “Crawl Issues” which is a new feature allows webmasters to find four types of issues as follows:

File Not Found (404)
Blocked by REP
Long Dynamic URLs
Unsupported Content-Types
For each issue webmaster center returns the URL & the data encountered.
-File Not Found: It lists all the pages that MSNbot tried to crawl and received an HTTP response code of 404. Generally, URLs listed here are from typos in links from other sites. You often can’t fix the link, but you can 301 transmit the typo to the correct page (for both a better user experience and reclaimed backlinks).
-Blocked By REP: It lists all pages that MSNbot tried to crawl but didn’t because they were blocked by the site’s robots.txt file or robots Meta tag. You should review this list and make sure you aren’t accidentally blocking access to pages you want indexed.
-Long Dynamic URLs: It lists all pages that have been flagged as having “exceptionally long query strings.” Microsoft says these URLs could lead MSNbot into an infinite loop as it tries to crawl all variations of potential parameter combinations and recommends webmasters find ways to shorten these dynamic URLs.
Unsupported Content Types: It lists all pages that are classified with content types that Live Search doesn’t index.

The crawl issue reports & download functionality features join the existing set which includes:
-indexing details
-penalty information
-robots.txt validator
-out bounding linking data
-sitemap submission
Backlinks data:
In the beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center they offered a limited look into back link data. They’ve significantly enhanced this tool, giving webmasters access to more data about their referring links. The new backlinks feature shows the total count of backlinks to a site. You can view a list of the top URLs in the tool or can download up to 1,000.
Making data more actionable:
Webmasters are analytical and rarely work alone. They often need to be able to grab as much data as they can, and take it offline into Excel or some type of database for analysis and collaboration with a client, marketing or engineering partner. To enable that, they’ve built a few new features into all our reports, both the new ones and the old ones.
-Advanced filtering: This way one can quickly scope the results to zoom into the data they need, without having to sift through all the results.
-Downloading data: For times when webmasters want to view a lot of results, they also provide a download option that can give access to the first 1,000 results in a CSV file that can be easily opened with Microsoft Excel or imported into a custom reporting tool. This can help a webmaster analyze the results and share them with colleagues.
-More than just a set of tools: When they launched webmaster center, few resources were launched to help the site owners to engage with them.

SEO widget – SEO statistics widget launched.

We recently developed a cute tool which will display your,

Alexa rank, Google data yahoo data, Pagerank and other search engine data on your website. Please check out your New widget here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php

This widget is a must have for your website it shows who is online on your website. This is an additional feature apart from the other features.

Publicis to buy performics from Google

Performics a search marketing firm and formerly a part of Double click is now being sold to Publicis for an undisclosed amount. Industry experts had been debating about a potential buy out performics due to the conflict of interest of Google’s polices. Google has the policy Dont be evil and if they run performics many of the other companies will complain that performics customers will get a boost from Google.
Also Search Engine Experts believe if Google runs performics some employees in performics will learn the GOogle search ranking algorithm and this will make their life easier in ranking their client sites.

Washington post reports

“Publicis, which aims to generate 25 percent of its sales from the Internet by
2010, said it would acquire Chicago-based Performics Search Marketing from
Google for an undisclosed amount.
The unit will boost Publicis’s strategic
entity unveiled in June called Vivaki, aimed at spurring growth at its digital
advertising units such as Digitas and Zenith-Optimedia.
In a statement,
Publicis quoted the research house Jupiter Media saying the global search market
was worth an estimated $9.9 billion in 2008 and is projected to grow at 12
percent compound annual growth rate through 2012. “

Google bans webposition Gold position checker

Google has always been warning against automated position checkers which uses a lot of its resources. Now Google has taken a stronger hand and has blocked Webposition Gold software from performing automated ranking requests in Google. AUtomate rank requests creates a lot of junk queries and uses a lot of server resources of Google. Google has been issuing warning not to use webposition Gold but people continue to use it. Now Google has taken action and has blocked all web position gold queries. Web position Gold has an unique way of sending queries to Google and it seems google was able to detect it using their bot filter software.

We at Search engine Genie never use bulk keyword rank checkers. Our rank checkers are search engine friendly and allows only limited queries per day.

Yaho search index and algorithm update

Yahoo recently updated their ranking algorithm. People in leading forums first noticing this change and now its live in Yahoo search. Yahoo previously announced that there will be constant updates happening to their algorithm and now it seems its happening.

Yahoo calls their update a weather report. They released a weather report about their search engine algorithm update recently.
According to yahoo search blog

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect the update will be completed soon.
Please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board to share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users. “