MSN search support much higher quality than Google – Sites gets individual attention,

MSN search team is very prompt in responding to client mails, Recently a client came to us with a site which was penalized by MSN search engine, they want us to get their site reincluded into MSN search and get the site indexed, We checked for problems and tried contacting MSN search, they gave a detailed and prompt reply,

MSN search support team rocks,

Hope MSN search becomes the search engine of the future, They are one of the search engines which can compete with google directly,

From: MSN Customer Support <*******************> Date: ******************8
Subject: RE: ************** – MSN Search: Search:Problems:finding a website
To: *****************

Hello *****************,

Thank you for writing to MSN Search Technical Support.

I am ****** and I understand that your website is not indexed in the MSN Search engine. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

While MSNBot is able to crawl many of the billions of web pages on the Internet, it can crawl them all. For example, if your site’s link structure does not have links to each page on your site, MSNBot may not be able to find all of the pages of your site. To determine whether we have encountered links to a particular page or domain, you can use the “link:” or “linkdomain:” search operator. Also, higher quality pages are more likely to be crawled than lower quality pages. For more information about search operators please visit http://search. msn.com/docs/help.aspx?t=SEARCH_REF_AdvSrchOperators.htm

Additionally, not every page that is crawled is indexed. For a site to be indexed, it must meet specific standards for content, design, and technical implementation. To help ensure that your site is indexed, confirm that it adheres to our design guidelines located at http://search. msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

To see which pages we have indexed from a site you can use the “site:” search operator. For more information about site indexing please visit http://search. msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GettingSiteIndexed.htm

Generally, if you follow these guidelines and MSN has encountered links to your site, you do not need to submit your URL for MSNBot to reach your site. However, if your site still does not appear in our index (using the “site:” search operator) you may want to submit your site’s URL to us at http://search. msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Please note that submitting your site does not guarantee that your site will be indexed, it simply help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it.

You are valuable at MSN and we look forward to providing you with consistent and effective service. If you have other inquiries, please do not hesitate to write back.

Sincerely,

**************
MSN Search Technical Support

— Original Message —
From: ***************
Sent: Thursday, ****************
To: Search.USA.EN
Subject: MSN Search:Search:Problems:finding a website

Service:
MSN Search

What type of problem do you have?
Search
Problems
finding a website

Full Name:
****************

What e-mail address would you like a response sent to?
*************

Primary e-mail address/member ID associated with the account you are inquiring about:
*********************

To ensure a quick resolution, provide as many details as possible, including the date and time the problem occurred, a description of what you were trying to do, the detailed steps you took that led up to the problem, and details on any error messages that you received.
I didn’t find my site indexed in msn and whenever i look into site:*******************i never see my site get crawled. so, i kindly request you to reinclude my site. site url is : ****************88

Specific details removed purposely

Yahoo search cache server not working, – half the time it doesnt work at all,

Yahoo’s search cache doesn’t work, Most of the time it doesnt work it is the same case now, When ever I try clicking on cache for various searches it gives the following message

“We’re sorry, but we could not process your request for the cache of ******************. Please click here to check the current page or check for previous versions at the Internet Archive.”

Latest Pagerank update to be delayed because of bigdaddy update,

Google didnt update their toolbar pagerank from october 2005, Usually its 3 months once pagerank update these days, everyone was waiting for a toolbar pagerank update,

Mattcutts has commented on his blog that bigdaddy update is the possible reason for visible toolbar pagerank update,

We need to wait to see more green for our sites 🙂

This is what matt said about PR update,

“Ben, I don’t know and it wouldn’t matter. No idea when the next toolbar PageRank update is. I’m guessing that the Bigdaddy changes might cause the PageRank update to come later.”

Re-inclusion timeline – one site’s experience – google 30 penalty experience shared by a webmasterworld.com member

a member in webmasterworld.com shared his experience on the 30 day penalty for sites imposed by google, Matt cutts blogged about this piloting sites idea here

A sample mail you will receive when your site suffers hidden text penalty or
doorway page penalty,

Dear site owner or webmaster of *******************,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here: google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently

pages from ***************/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

On http://www.chefrevival.com.au/, we noticed the following hidden text: “seo
, search engine optimization, seo company, search engine optimization company,
search engine optimization companies ********** ***************** *******************
”

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you
wish to be

reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our

quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion

request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website”
and then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in
ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion
Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

This is what chinkchink of webmasterworld.com said in his posting

“am one of those thousands who get the Google email about the 30-days
out-of-index penalty. Just want to share the timeline of re-inclusion I experienced
for others to reference:

1/4/2006 – Got email from Google about the hidden text on our website. Home
page PR 5, interior pages PR 2-4, over 700 pages indexed. Googlebot visited
daily. On some weekends, Googlebot request count was between 200-300.

1/8/2006 – website disappeared in SERP, PR drop to 0 for the entire site. Search
with “site:www.mysite.com” returned 0 match.

1/9/2006 – removed all hidden text in question.

1/10/2006 – Submitted re-inclusion request.

1/9 – 2/7 – Googlebot visited about 2-4 times a day during this period. No
email or other communication from/to Google.

2/8/2006, noon – exactly 30 days after our site disappeared from SERP. Home
page PR back to 5. Log file from 0:00AM to 12:00PM shows 22 visits from Googlebot.

Back in SERP for most of our keywords but over all ranking dropped about 2-10
slots (this is natural without the hidden text). “

Interesting how google is actively seeking webmasters to clean up good sites,

blog.outer-court.com reports netbooster was behind penalizing bmw.de from google’s index,

google blogscoped reports that netbooster.com a famous SEO company was behind the penalty of bmw.de, Bmw.de was recently penalized by google for using sneaky JS redirects which misleaded users, Now they are reincluded into the index after clean up of spam pages,

It seem netbooster.com is behind their optimization their site is PR0 now and is completely removed from the index,

Senior Google search engineer matt cutts says in his blog

“I appreciate BMW’s quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Google’s index.”

Yahoo has a blog bot – Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 – Is yahoo planning to introduce blog search,

Recently we had a crawl from Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 bot, they were searching for our xml feed, think this is new yahoo seem to be planning to start something similar to blogsearch.google.com ( google’s blog search )

This is what yahoo says about their bot

“Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 is Yahoo!’s blog indexing robot. As part of the crawling effort, Yahoo!’s blog crawler will take robots.txt standards into account to ensure we do not crawl and index content from those pages whose content you do not want included in Yahoo! Search Technology. If a page is disallowed to be crawled by robots.txt standards, Yahoo! will not read or use the contents of that page. The URL of a protected page may be included in Yahoo! Search Technology as a “thin” document with no text content. Links and reference text from other public web pages provide identifiable information about a URL and may be indexed as part of web search coverage.

help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-02.html

Verbatim: Search firms surveyed on privacy – 7 questions for google,

Declan McCullagh and Elinor Mills Staff Writer for cnet writes,

Google were asked 7 questions regarding privacy issues, especially with the recent problems with censorship in china and the US Subpoena for search data these questions were important,

Google spokesman Steve Langdon

Q: What information do you record about searches? Do you store IP addresses linked to search terms and types of searches (image vs. Web)?
(Editor’s note: Google pointed to its list of Frequently Asked Questions on Google.com, which says in detail what is collected and stored.)

Given a list of search terms, can you produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or cookie value?
Langdon: Yes. We can associate search terms with IP addresses and cookies, but not with users’ names unless they are registered with Google.

Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of people? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
Langdon: We do not share information about that. (Editor’s note: Google did acknowledge, however, that it has had legal requests for Gmail e-mail.)

Given an IP address or cookie value, can you produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?
Langdon: Yes.

Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of search terms? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
Langdon: We do not share information about that.

Do you ever purge these data, or set an expiration date of, for instance, two years or five years?
Langdon: We keep data for as long as it is useful. There are several uses, several of which are described in our privacy policy and FAQ. There isn’t a specified period.

Do you ever anticipate offering search engine users a way to delete that data?
Langdon: We have no plans to announce such a product. However, users can use Google without a cookie.

Google and microsoft to pay compensation to verizon for usage of their network,

Google to pay verizon regarding usage of verizon internet network,

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch on the Internet, according to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who said Thursday that providers of bandwith-intensive Internet applications, including Google and Microsoft, should “share the cost” of operating broadband networks.
According to Seidenberg, Verizon and Google are already talking about how such compensation might be structured, striking a tone far more diplomatic than AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who last year openly criticized Internet application providers like Google and Voice over IP provider Vonage Holdings.
“We talk to them [Google] all the time, and they understand the issue,” said Seidenberg, in a question-and-answer period following his keynote speech Thursday at the Consumer Electronics show here. Google, which already offers a bevy of online apps like email, instant messaging, voice and satellite map searches, is expected to announce a video-download service here Friday. (Google could not be reached for comment immediately.) “

networkingpipeline.com/news/175801767

new Bigdaddy datacenters report huge increase in search result pages

comparing to the previous google the new improved googlebot which powers the bigdaddy datacenters are having huge increase in indexed data, Could this be because of new googlebot’s ( google’s crawler ) effective way of crawling sophisticated Javascript, flash, frames etc??

A search for *.* showed 9,660,000,000 now its showing 25,270,000,000 ( that’s more than 25 billion ) results,

A search for “the” showed 8,660,000,000 now its showing 22,010,000,000

Is new bigdaddy infrastructure datacenter a step ahead in google’s crawling technology??????

Have Sitemaps killed my site? – interesting thread in webmasterworld

An interesting thread in webmasterworld.com was discussing about a site’s pages which went URL only after signing up for google sitemaps, so did google sitemaps affect his site’s indexing of pages,

Webmasterworld.com member mrmister says

“I noticed that there are about 8 pages that are URL only. I’ve never seen this happen before. I did a standard Google search for my “green widgets” category page by searching for [green widgets]. It used to appear somewhere on page 1 but it was no longer there. I clicked to page 2 and I found my “history of green widgets” page sitting at the top of page 2. The “history of green widgets” page is the only subcategory page that is still listed as non-URL only. I checked my logs and Google has yet to crawl this page.
The site itself is a small site (about 80 pages). It’s been going in various guises for about 10 years and therefore has a fair amount of inbound links (mainly to internal pages rather than the home page). For most categories it gets to page 1 of the SERPs for two work keyphrases. I gave it a design overhaul about a year back to convert it from tag soup to clean valid HTML and CSS. I changed the linking structure and the URLs using 301s. I also improved the prominence of Adsense ads (that I’d been trailing for about a year previous) It weathered the change fine (some previous number 1 results dropped down a few places but nothing major).
There have been no major changes since then. I’ve added a few categories. It’s all been fine, every page has been indexed in a timely fashion.
However a week ago, I signed up to Google Sitemaps. I am wondering if this is connected in any way with the URL-only pages that I’m starting to see. “

So what could have caused this, Submitting to google sitemaps might have been a coincidence,