Seems like Microsoft either experiences some problems with its queries processing or plans to re-build its services structure. The latest news that alarmed the whole SEO community was the post in Live Search official blog that they have disabled the link:, linkdomain: and inurl functionalities in the search engine.
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.
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It is widely known currently among Yahoo PPC advertisers that with panama update in early February the new metrics – Quality score was implemented to the ads. However, not everybody is aware of how exactly this variable will influence your campaign performance while it affects the keyword’s CPC directly.
After Yahoo’s ads ranking system has changed an advertiser might find his ad to be more, less or equally relevant to the average ads of competitors. This is based on predicted CTR for your ad and will be reflected on your campaign costs. While previous Yahoo bidding model considered only the CPC you are willing to pay, Panama makes the ad position calculation more flexible. Your add can appear higher than your competitor’s even though your CPC is lower as ad rank is calculated by multiplying ad’s predicted CPC with bid price.
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Some Internet advertisers might have already received the email notification from Microsoft AdCenter support team about the launch of the content advertising pilot program. Recently the upgrade was announced on AdCenter Blog also.
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AskCity recently announced of implementing the new function to its Local Search. For now and on you can not only mark the areas on the map and send friends but you can use special drawing tools to perform search within the area you’ve specified. Use squares, circles or polygons to point the area of search either lines to point a street, however long or short it is.
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Have you mentioned Yahoo showing related searches for image search? Showing the queries being search by others who was looking for the same thing as you do is a good idea. For example it seems rather logical that those who make an image search for MSN are shown Yahoo, Google and HotMail as related queries. Though, images that are attached to the links look irrelevant and made me smile:)
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Recently published interview with Justin Osmer – Senior Product Manager at Microsoft – touched upon Live QnA product. Introduced last September, this service “is a very good place to go for opinion based sorts of things”. When it goes about some rather complex queries that plain automated search engine is not able to give an accurate answer for there is a good option to ask the question you’re interested in at Live QnA.
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As SEO consultants we know how much time and efforts it might take to achieve high positions for a site sometimes. That is why after receiving desired ranks being excluded from Google index because of the site’s being down during the Google bot crawling it is twice more unpleasant.
A thread from the updated Google Groups points out that
I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeared from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now – nothing.
It’s hard to imagine the disappointment of that site owner from his site being removed from Google’s index. But Vanessa Fox from Google confirms that if the site is down and its pages are inaccessible for Google crawler, then it might lead to exclusion from Google index.
If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.
The good thing to know about this is that you shouldn’t request site reinclusion. Google will automatically continue trying to access your pages and as soon it founds them, they will be back in Google index.
You’re right that requesting reinclusion is only for sites that have violated the guidelines. This isn’t the situation in your case, and there’s no need to contact us to let us know that your site has moved and is available again, as Googlebot will keep rechecking for it automatically.
