The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

Sometimes product team surveys pose more questions than just those meant to be answered by the participants. Surveys like this one, which contain the usual questions relating currently implemented vertical search engines contained in Live Search, such as Health, Video and Shopping, but also alludes to possible functions to come:

• searching online to plan for a trip or vacation
• searching online for news
• what tools could a search engine provide to enhance the look and feel of the initial search page and the layout of the results page?

A travel vertical search engine would be intriguing, especially if combined with the new image and video search, which would provide stunning, powerful results.

A real time news search would be no less startling. Though news search is available, the current incarnation dates back to MSN Search and just isn't up to the same game as, for example, Google News, which is itself by no means perfect. If Microsoft can put a News search in place that's on par with the rest of Live Search, they stand a good chance of one-upping Google... at least, for awhile.

The next Live Search update is projected for early '08, so it's a case of wait and see. But what we see so far makes us think the short wait will be worth it.

Labels: google, live, msn, search

Google once again flexes its search muscle, continuing to increase its lead over its closest challengers Yahoo and Windows Live/MSN.

For October alone, according to ComScore, Inc., Google Sites increased its lead atop the core search ranking with 58.5 percent of U.S. searches, gaining 1.5 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.9 percent, followed
by Microsoft Sites (9.7 percent), Ask Network (4.7 percent) and Time Warner
Network (4.2 percent). Let's go to the numbers:

comScore Core Search Report*
October 2007
Total U.S. -- Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

Share of Searches (%)
Point
Change
Oct-07 vs.
Core Search Entity Sep - 07 Oct -07 Sep-07

Total Core Search 100.0 % 100.0 % 0.0
Google Sites 57.0 % 58.5 % 1.5
Yahoo! Sites 23.7 % 22.9 % -0.8
Microsoft Sites 10.3 % 9.7 % -0.6
Ask Network 4.7 % 4.7 % 0.0
Time Warner Network 4.3 % 4.2 % -0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

We Americans love our searches, and we just keep getting more and more passionate about it. In October, we conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines, up 12-percent from September. Google got most of that love, 6.1 billion core searches during the month, up 15 percent, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.4 billion, an increase of 8 percent. Have you hugged your Google today?

Labels: google, msn, search, yahoo

At Searchification 2007, Microsoft showed off a Webmaster portal designed to run side-by-side with the new Live Search, and it is now available in beta. The portal first asks you to setup a profile for the website you want to analyze, which unsurprisingly includes a verification step; you can either upload an xml file or insert a meta tag. The service seems to pick up the meta tag update immediately, which means you can get right to work.

The summary page is basic but functional, showing when your site was last crawled (or if your site is blocked) and how many pages are included in the Live Search index. For webmasters experiencing problems with a site, this should be your first port of call. The domain rank graphic is a nice touch, though breaking it down into five levels seems insufficient for really being able to gauge performance. For comparison, Google Pagerank goes up to 10, and we're rated 6, how this equates to a Live Search 5/5 we don't know.

Additionally there is a keyword analysis tool, showing how you would perform on Live Search for certain search queries. Again the lack of granularity in the rating system hurts here, to improve your SEO you have to do badly at something! To wrap it all off there is an inbound and outbound link analysis, which if you run a proper website (i.e.: not a blog) will help see where you site is being promoted.

Overall the beta of Live Search Webmaster portal does an OK job, offering nothing stellar if your website is being indexed regularly but offering a good starting location for those having problems.

All that said, you can try out Live Search Webmaster Portal at http://webmaster.live.com

And the latest release of Live Maps also added a new portal for business owners who want to update their listings on the service; check it out at http://llc.local.live.com.

Labels: msn, seo tools