There is a discussion thread going on over at Webmaster World at the moment which has a bit of a debate on how to optimise for Microsoft’s Live Search. The thread looks at the iimportance of content, freshness page size and weight, as well at the usual basic SEO principles.
Microsoft have just announced a new operator, LinkFromDomain, which can be used to find all sites that are linked from a domain, an addition to the LinkDomain operator which includes all sites that link to a domain.
Microsoft have a demo available, but check this link to see where ambergreen’s site links to according to Microsoft.
Microsoft also has a great list of advanced search operators designed to make our jobs easier, which can all be used in conjunction with one another to get a really clear picture of a site’s linking and index situation. Google and MSN have always provided poor quality linking information in comparison to Yahoo!, whose Site Explorer provides a comprehensive link data analysis.
Over at SEO Scoop there is a post concerning a site penalised by MSN for “exchanging links with sites unrelated to … site content”. Surely linking with sites not in the same thematic group should only be considered ineffective and not illegal? If thematically unrelated links can prompt MSN to penalise a site, surely many worthy and relevant sites will have problems making the grade on MSN and therefore struggle to gain traffic from the site, making links from potentially unrelated, but traffic driving sites, all the more important?
SEO by the sea has published an article reporting on 20 different ways that search engines can rerank results, ranging from population or audience segmentation information, to country specific results and historical data, this is an exceptionally good article giving really clear analysis of the reasons a page might be reranked.
Do you know of any additional reasons that might be employed?
In case you missed it, MSN recently relaunched Live Search, taking it out of beta. It’s a pretty good attempt at shaping up MSN’s search capabilities and is well worth checking out.
With this redeveloped search service, MSN has taken aspects from Google and Yahoo! to turn Live Search into a real competitor with the potential to lose its third place position and gain increased market share.
Personalisation is one of the main aspects to the new service, allowing great user control. In addition the relevancy of results has improved, and with related searches also easily accessible in the top right hand of the page, Microsoft has made a major step forward in terms of relevancy and usability.
Localisation also comes into play and some great extra features such as the inclusion of the images scratchpad show that Microsoft has made great strides with this launch.
Why not take a look at the new and improved Live Search and let us know what you think?
