jatiN mahindrA doT coM

The UK Bing Ads : Here Is a Video

As many of you know, Microsoft is conducting a major ad blitz in the UK in order to capture market share for Bing, their search engine. Bing’s product manager sent me a link to one of the new commercials, which is now on YouTube. Here is a video of the new commercial: What do you think? It looks similar to the US commercials, just with UK accents. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. ...

MSN’s New Portal Now Live

If you visit MSN.com today, you may notice a new look and feel for the site. The beta design is now the new official look for MSN. Like it or not, this is the new look for now. Greg Sterling reports that about 50% of the Bing search queries are driven from the MSN portal. So this new design may or may not have an impact on that. 50% is major and clearly Microsoft is aware of that. Forum discussion...

Microsoft Aims To Capture UK Search Market Share with Ads

There are reports that Microsoft is going to do a huge ad push in the UK in an effort to capture market share there. Currently, Microsoft’s Bing has a 3% share of search, whereas Google holds about a 90% share. Here is the news: Microsoft is to launch a multimillion-pound TV ad campaign for its search engine Bing, as part of a major marketing push designed to challenge Google’s dominance...

Bing: We Know About Your Images & Choose Not To Show Them

We rarely ever talk about Bing’s outstanding image search, but I spotted a thread today in the Bing Community forums on that topic. In short, one webmaster complained that Bing had about 50% of the images from his site, when compared to Google. So Google had about 50 pictures from this guys site in their index, coming up for a site command. Bing had about half that. Brett Yount forwarded...

Bing: We Know About Your Images & Choose Not To Show Them

We rarely ever talk about Bing’s outstanding image search, but I spotted a thread today in the Bing Community forums on that topic. In short, one webmaster complained that Bing had about 50% of the images from his site, when compared to Google. So Google had about 50 pictures from this guys site in their index, coming up for a site command. Bing had about half that. Brett Yount forwarded...

Bing Doesn’t Like Redirect Chains, No One Does Really

A Bing Community thread talks about Bing’s crawlers and indexers ability in following chains of redirects. A redirect chain is when you have two or more URLs that are being redirects to another URL. For example, if I have domain.com/pageA redirect to domain.com/pageB and then from domain.com/pageB to domain.com/pageC – that is a redirect chain. Search engines typically crawl them fine,...

Bing Recommends W3C Compliant Code For Better Indexing

A Bing Community thread has a Microsoft Bing representative telling SEOs that W3C complaint code can help with indexing content. Brett Yount, the program manager at Bing Webmaster Center, said: Clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the SEs. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template. We all know that Google said time and time again that validated code does...

Why Might You Be Redirected To A Localized Version of Bing?

On occasions, I hear in the forums complaints that people are going to Google.com or Bing.com and are being redirected to a localized version, outside of their local. For example, a Bing Community thread reports one user in the US being redirected to Bing France and a Google Web Search Help thread has another user from Brooklyn, New York complaining about being redirected to Google Puerto Rico. Why...

Bing Masking MSNBot As Internet Explorer or a Rogue Bot?

A Bing Community thread reports from one webmaster that someone is masking MSNBot around as a browser, either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Here are the reported IPs and UserAgent’s being reporting by this webmaster: The following IP addresses are from MSN’s search bots, but use what appears to be just normal user agents. 65.55.109.22 65.55.109.106 65.55.109.118 65.55.109.119 65.55.109.120 65.55.109.162...

Bing Webmaster Tools Mysterious Missing Domains?

A Bing Community thread has reports that when webmasters authenticate domains within Bing Webmaster Tools, the next day, the domains are no longer listed. Supposedly there are several reports about this in the past week or so. Here is one report: I (for the very first time) submitted several URL’s, and I also authenticated my website by adding a LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml to my website sites,...

Bing Advertising On Intellitxt

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that Bing is advertising their search engine on Intellitxt. Intellitxt are those ads you see inline articles, where you mouse over a word and an annoying ad pops up. I personally find those ads to be incredibly annoying, intrusive and invasive. But many publishers use them and according to the WebmasterWorld post, Bing is using it to advertise their search engine. The...

Bing Indexing New Content & Sites Faster?

A WebmasterWorld thread has some positive news for the Microsoft Bing team! The thread is praising Bing for speeding up their indexing and ranking of new pages, updated content and new web sites. This comes several weeks after Bing declared they were slow at indexing new sites. So I am happy that webmasters, at least some, are happy with the speed of Bing’s crawler and indexer. Mack, the forum...

Bing Leads Customers To Competitors With Their Best Match Information

A complaint from a Carpet store owner in the Bing Community shows how Bing is sending his customers to his competitors. If you search for [carpetswarehouse.com] on Bing, and mouse over the “Best Match Information” arrow on the right of the result, Bing will show the wrong information. In fact, Bing is showing the phone number to his competitor. Here is a picture: The Carpet guy said: Bing...

Bing to Fix SafeSearch Bug With Text Results

Brett Yount from Bing has confirmed a bug with Bing’s SafeSearch filter in a Bing Community thread. The issue is that when you set your Bing Search preferences to the SafeSearch setting of “Moderate Filter adult images and videos but not text from your search results,” it doesn’t seem to work as described. It should only block out adult images and videos, but leave adult...

Bing Updates Webmaster FAQs Into 82 Questions

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, announced they have revised the Webmaster FAQs into a single 28 page PDF document. The document can be downloaded over here. It has 82 detailed questions and answers, organized into 12 categories. The questions and answers are ironically hyperlinked in the PDF document, but not available as a web page. I guess those Q&As won’t be indexed too well...