This coming Thursday, I've been invited to present to the Live Search team over in Redmond. We'll be discussing all sorts of issues, including spam on Live, increasing retention rates for searchers and growing relationships between Live and webmasters. However, I can't represent the entire search community on my own, so I'm hoping to solicit your input. What would you like to see Live do to make it easier to interface with their search engine from a webmaster perspective, and as a user?
Some of the things I'm intending to discuss include:
- Tools & information that Live could provide to webmasters & SEOs
- Some specific examples of where Live seems to be struggling against manipulative link building techniques
- Signals that might help to establish trust between sites and Live
- Opportunities for establishing and benefiting from greater community involvement in the SEO/M world
- Advantages & disadvantages of including vertical & specialized results
- The visual interface of Live's result pages
- The Live vs. MSN branding decision
As I look at Live's results, I see a lot of opportunity for improvement. It's my sincere belief that interfacing actively with people inside the search community will help to get the Live engineers exposure to a great number of issues at the engine. Just running through a few searches, I found some material that might be of interest to their search quality team:
- Weddings near Ashland, OR - it appears that Live isn't recognizing the "OR" as referring to Oregon, as most of the results center around Ashland, Wisconsin
- Popurls - oddly, the PopURLs website doesn't appear on the first page for its own name
- Yahoo Answers - a strange broken out result is #2, and a similar pattern also exists for searches like New York Times (note the strangely high placement of the Migrant Camp Laborers article).
- WSJ - the page is right, but the title and description are bizarre - "interstitial page?"
- House Values - It looks like Live doesn't interpret "house" and "home" as meaning the same thing. This means that Zillow doesn't have their usual rule of the SERPs - they're not even in the top 100.
- John McCain - The first two pages are the same result
Obviously, I'm going out of my way to point out foibles, and among the few dozen searches I ran tonight, there were plenty where Live did a fine job. However, I don't think they'd get much value out of me patting them on the back, so we'll focus on those issues where they're struggling. However, if you do have a positive comment or something they're doing that you like, I'll bet they'd love to hear it.
Thanks so much for your help. Please constribute by posting your thoughts, concerns & issues below. I can promise that they'll get in front of the people behind Live.com - a very rare opportunity.
BTW - As I mentioned to Nathan (a senior PM at Live) on the phone today; I must say that it's fun working with Microsoft on a project where they're the underdog - there's a great depth of resources to pull from and an incredibly tough challenge ahead. And, for those who are concerned, this is a pro bono gig, like the presentation I gave to Google, so there should be no conflict of interest - we're all trying to make search a better place to be for SEOs, businesses, search engines and users.
I'm also embedding a Sphinn link (which I need to start doing more often, I think):
I would like to suggest Live send my sites more traffic. If they do that I will be a happy camper.
Oh yeah, you're a real help, Randall. I'll let them know :)
I knew I could count on you!
I'd love to hear about their plans to integrate Aquantive, now that Microsoft finished the acquisition yesterday. Will Atlas become the new Google Analytics - and is that a good thing or a conflict of interest?
It might be nice if they considered making their actual (accurate) search data available for sale...maybe with a nice shiny API, too.
Shiny API.
On the Live PPC front:
I would really appreciate the release of a software tool similar to the Google Adwords editor which lets me do mass changes offline and batch upload.
Also, it would be nice to be able to set custom date ranges in the campaign view - right now as far as I can tell you can only set custom date ranges by running a report.
I will second both of those.
In fact, I'd quite like someone to make a (relatively inexpensive) tool that could allow me to upload to MSN, Yahoo & the big G. Can't see any of *them* making one though (if MSN did, it might result in a lot more advertisers, short term - lowering the barrier to creating an account).
Live's biggest problems are spam (which is getting better), they don't index internal pages very well so obscure searches do not work (I have noticed this on Yahoo as well, although they are slightly better in this respect), and also the problems that they have with indexing.
Their interface is nice, and I like the search engine but it still doesn't even come close to Google.
Muhammad wrote a little on the growth of live over on pronet.
I have to say I'm guilty of not using Live enough to know what it's issues are - very little UK traffic in our experience.
On the paid-search front, if you can get them to support Firefox properly in the AdCenter control panel, I would be very grateful!
It's not so much an improvement to a current feature but I think there's a gap in the market at the moment for them to over-take yahoo as the SEO/webmasters portal. Currently I use Yahoo for the majority of my link analysis and a hefty chunk of my keyphrase research.
The problem is that Yahoo's traffic data is now outdated and their link tool is getting more temperamental every day. If MSN/Live can come up with something which works and is effective then they could seriously undermine or even overtake Yahoo's dominance in this area.
Word! Seconded! Accurate link data for all!
it still seems strange seeing 'microsoft' and 'underdog' together... i'm very interested to hear whatever feedback you get from the Live team. It's good that they are trying to differentiate themselves from google, but it would be nice to get some more details on how they plan to do it...
First of all, this is excellent news. Now that Google has joined the dark side and is in quest of world domination, we all need to do what we can to suppport Microsoft's efforts. Because a strong, effective Live means a balanced search market. Right now it is not balanced and Google is hungry for it all, reeling about like Scarface, completely unchecked, and not afraid of anybody. It is in all our best interests to help build a search engine that won't behave like a runaway train.
Several responses to your specific areas.
(Removed by author so you-know-whoogle doesn't get to read it. Emailed to blog owner.)
I am definitely interested to see how microsoft can be more competitive in search. As I have used their development tools for a number of years I sure hope their webmaster tools that they develop will be great.
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Not so much a suggestion but a comment. For whatever reason the quality of traffic my company's website is getting from Live is killing the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. The bounce rate is 11% for Live and 42% for Google. I have just begun to work on the site but I found this interesting. Live also has the best avg page views. Of course the traffic is 30x less than Google so that could have something to do with it.
I've heard this from others as well, Mike - that traffic quality on MSN seems to be much higher than from other engines. It must have something to do with their demographic.
I've seen this as well. Especially in the PPC game it seems like the traffic from Live is much more targeted. But yeah, it could just be the fact that the volume is MUCH less than google.
I'd like to see when live search is actually following through with their announcement to implement the sitemap standard. They are party to the original announcement, but the submission service has been failing ever since.
Also, adding to the complains of crawling/indexing depth, and index updates, as well as at least consistent data for a site:... command (varies by 300% in ten minues)
K<o>
Hello friends,
I'am new here.This is my first post.
I want to tell that SEO's will love if live search listings could carry serial numbers at first like when we search for a keyword in Yahoo, it gives results with 1,2,3.. numbering. This can surely help all seo's who want to know the actual position of their site in SERPS.
Although this is not something major, yet it will help all seo's tracking site's actual position through keywords and yes this can be positive for live as Google is not doing it and only Yahoo does this at present.
Thanks !
Just tell them to look at how google spiders their web properties and figure out what's lacking in their own spider.
I'm of the mind that a search engine is built on it's ability to crawl pages. MSN's crawler sucks, Yahoo's is bad, Google's rocks.
I've seen that they're fairly good about crawling, though not nearly as fast as the new upgraded Googlebot that Matt talked to me about. I'll certainly relay the depth issues, though.
Yeah. If I could have only one comment to make to them it would be the crawler depth - they really need to figure that one out as they are missing out on a lot.
I'd love to hear Matt Cutts swing by and leave his thoughts on what MSN needs to do :-)
I've noticed similar problems to your mention of "Ashland, OR." I live in Rochester, MI and most of the time when I search for local items from the live.com homepage, I get results for Rochester, NY even though I specifically add the MI or the Michigan as a modifier.
My brother teaches at Rochester High School. :)
I would be interested in knowing how live deals with long/dynamic urls, because I already heard some people say that it might deal with them in a very different way that Google.
And how does using a MS development tool (.NET) influence the way your sites are indexed and ranked?
I know of a new domain that was registered in mid-July - it's indexed in Yahoo! and Google now - but not Live/MSN. Have not built it out other than in terms of social bookmarking. What is their point of view on determining relevancy in this arena?
I'll email you the domain privately as I don't wish to seem promotional of it and it hasn't been built.
Look forward to your report. Have fun.
A site I optimized that used to rank very well on MSN had its rankings improve on Google and Yahoo but is now completely buried on MSN. The great staff here at the Moz commented that it was probably the few links pointing to the site but why the improvements in Yahoo and Google but this total annhilation by MSN?
It seems that MSN is either your best friend or worst enemy, depending on your luck. It's great that they weigh Title tags so heavily, when you know how to write them, but it's a shame that variables that I don't understand sometimes inexplicably destroy your rankings.
If I were to offer Live some meagre advice, it would be to keep weighing Title tags rather heavily because it's an excellent opportunity for new, well-written sites and smaller businesses to get a foot in the SERP door.
Most of what I use MSN/Live for is the search data and look forward to KSP being released rather than Live being refined.
I think that's the biggest crux, Google is the big player with the most searchers, but they keep their data very close. MSN's adlab has some great data, but it's either broken or horrible to export. Live (or Ask) has the opportunity to really bring out some great resources for the SEM community if they open the flood gates a bit more on things like link banks, search volumes, demographics, etc.
Like shor pointed out, Search Marketers would become great lobbyists for the underdog engine that does that.
If only I was in Seattle this week! Rand, can you get Redmond to conference us into the presentation? :P
"Opportunities for establishing and benefiting from greater community involvement in the SEO/M world"
This is great topic and one area where Live.com team fails (whenever i see fail, i see stupid lolcats)
Search marketers are lobbyists for search. If we say Live sucks and Google rocks, we'll tell the family and tell our friends. We'll tell the marketing director and the CEO, we'll blog about it, digg about it and sphinn it. Heck, we'll even blog about it on SEOmoz. Ripples in the pond...
Live.com barely registers on the Australian search radar. Sad but true.
Ask them if they plan on have a "webmaster tools" area soon for all of us.
+1 for adding a webmaster tools section.
The reason Google was a runaway success with zero advertising is they catered to early adopters, geeks, hardcore computer users, and techies.
If MSN was to share some of it's data, the hardcore search users would come in droves and this would trickle down to average users.
If an SEO gives a presentation showing link data from MSN it is more likely everyone who sees the presentation, including non techies, will test MSN themselves.
Another problem is that MSN used to sell position to the highest bidder through looksmart.com and their "natural" search results were tainted.
Some people have forgot/forgiven MSN for this, but I haven't. MSN still has to prove to me that they will never pollute natural results with pay for performance listings.
Also, pick a name and stick with it. MSN - the more you change your name the less likely I am to ever use you.
Exactly. I really feel like catering to the geeks is the best way for MSN to jump back into the game. One of MSN's problems though is the giant factor of Microsoft, it causes them to associate that hugeness with themselves and/or Live, but when it comes to search they're easily a David.
For Ask.com creating powerful analytical tools for webmasters is likely one of their few legitimate avenues to getting more publicity and diehard users.
Ask them simply why they prefer on-site optimization and fresh content over what Google prefers which are authoritative and relevant links to your website.
Not saying either are right or wrong, just would like to get a better understanding of where they are coming from.
Competitive differentiation perhaps? They found an area that people complain about with Google and capitolized on it. Hooray for Live on this one.
Rand - This sounds like a terrific opportunity!
My MSN issues:
I second (or fifth) the spammy results problem, but when I reported them, they were adjusted quickly and I was very impressed by the response time. Unfortunately, after a few weeks some of those listings resurfaced or were replaced by worse results.
They seem to place far too much emphasis on the keyword in the URL. I'm also noticing a trend of the keyword appearing in the title and description a LOT and I mean three to five mentions in each area.
I've also had the problem of a redirected site remaining indexed above the new location up to nine months after the 301 was instituted.
Another problem has been repetitious sites... I'll see a site with up to six results in the top fifty for completely spammy keyword-targeted pages.
I'm sure there's more, I'll post as I come across them.
I would LOVE more webmaster support. I'm not sure if there's a way to limit the nonsense posts, but a forum or webmaster group would be really useful for relaying issues as they appear and suggestions.
I think they also need to make it easier to find materials on their site like the webmaster guidelines and useful tools... I search Google to find MSN tools because I can't find them with their engine!
Not sure if they're ready for personalized search... they need to master general first!
Visually speaking, I don't mind the interface, but would love it if they numbered the organic results like Yahoo. :)