You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?
Hands up those of you who have verified your sites with Google Webmaster Tools? Ok, good. Now keep your hands up if you’ve done the same for Yahoo Site Explorer? Hmmm a few hands dropped then.
Now keep your hands up if you’ve verified your site with Bing Webmaster Center? Oh dear.
Seems quite a few webmasters are concentrating on Google and forgetting about the other major search engines. If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you really need to verify your site and sitemaps with the big 3 and monitor your stats regularly.
Most people are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, but today I want to give you a brief overview of Bing Webmaster Center.
To add a site to Bing Webmaster Center, simply login to your Bing account (or create a new one) and then type in a URL and a sitemap if you have one. You will be prompted to verify your site via either a meta verification tag you place in your home page header, or an XML file that you upload to your server.
Once you’ve verified your first site, you’ll see a dashboard that looks quite similar to Google Webmaster Tools, with the following tabs:
- Summary – lists the date Bing last crawled your site, the number of indexed pages, your domain score and the top 5 pages of your site.
- Profile – lists your URL, the verification process you used and the email address associated with your site.
- Crawl Issues – lists any issues Bing discovered while crawling and indexing your site, such as 404 errors, malware infections and long dynamic URLs.
- Backlinks – lists which webpages (including your own) are linking to your site.
- Outbound Links – lists the web pages your site is linking to.
- Keywords – allows you to see how your pages are performing in search results for specific keywords.
- Sitemaps – provides various ways for you to notify MSNBot of new sitemaps or when you change an existing sitemap.
The following additional tools are available when you’re logged into Webmaster Center:
- Robots.txt validator
- HTTP verifier
- Keyword research tool
So don’t ignore Bing Webmaster Center. Remember that Google is NOT the Internet.
Microsoft and Yahoo announced today that their planned Search Alliance has been given the go-ahead by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission without any restrictions.
The exact implementation is yet to be announced, but will involve Yahoo shifting their organic and paid search operations to Microsoft. Yahoo will then display primary search results from Bing and enhance them with Yahoo content.
From Yahoo’s official press release:
“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.”
Advertising for both companies will be managed by Microsoft’s adCenter platform (meaning the closure of Yahoo Search Marketing) and prices for all search ads will be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
According to a memo sent to all Yahoo advertisers today:
- Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers will log into one place – Microsoft’s adCenter – to manage campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better ROI.
- Yahoo is hoping to transition advertisers and partners in the U.S. prior to October 2010, but may wait until 2011 for efficiency reasons.
- Advertisers will reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites as well as other premium partner sites, with a single buy on adCenter.
- Yahoo will give Search Marketing advertisers 3 months warning of any changes to take place.
The two search giants have created a web site dedicated to the partnership and Yahoo has implemented a Transition Center for advertisers.
What does it mean for the search industry? To use a silly dinosaur analogy, (because who doesn’t like those?), it means that Bing the Triceratops and Yahoo the Brontosaurus have just combined to become an aggressive Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s going on a hunt for the Google Gigantosaurus.
Should be quite a spectacle.
The latest issue of the Search Light newsletter published this week. And we’re pretending it’s January, even though it’s February – if that makes sense. Hopefully our February issue will come out in February rather than March!
Believe it or not, 2010 is our 10th year of publishing The Search Light. My, how things have changed in the search engine landscape since we published our first ever issue nearly 10 years ago.
This month’s newsletter includes an article about how to choose the most effective SEO keywords, written by Search Engine College Assistant Tutor, Micky Stuivenberg. It also contains some of the more interesting FAQs answered in this blog and a blurb about the upcoming Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference in Sydney.
If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber catch it here and then quickly go and subscribe before I find out.
Hi Kalena
I have come across a company that guarantees placement in the top 7 of Google local business results within 60 days or they give the money back. Does this sound kosher to you?
They charge a one-time set up fee of $50 and $49 a month. Is there a way that you could tell me to do that? I know they submit to a lot of search engines. Is this a fraud? The company is Geo Listing Service out of Las Vegas.
Thank you for your help.
Best,
Lois
————————————–
Hi Lois
It’s just a scam. You can get a site listed in Google Local for free by making sure your business is listed in Google Maps.
More info here:
Google Local Business Center
Google Maps Local Business Help
Just to wind ‘em up, ask this Vegas mob why you should pay for a service that’s provided free by Google and watch them back-pedal. Better still, share the results with us in the comments!
Twitter quietly rolled out a new feature today that enables users to choose a regional preference for viewing trending topics.
Called Twitter Local Trends, the new functionality gives users the option to set their regional location and view trending topics happening in their part of the world. For example, one of the screenshots pictured shows that the topic “Trafalgar Square” is trending for users that have United Kingdom set as their region (because it relates to a well known London icon), but not for users that have set their region to Worldwide.
At this stage, only seven countries and 15 cities in the US are available for selection (see screenshot below) but more will be added soon.
According to a post on Mashable, the feature has only rolled out to around 1 percent of Twitter users, but there’s nothing official on the Twitter Blog about it yet. I noticed it in my account this afternoon so I’m not sure if I’m part of the lucky 1 percent or whether it has rolled out to a larger audience since it went live this morning.
Regardless, when it does roll out to everyone, it will make a huge difference to how we use Twitter to target a regional audience. The benefits for geo-based mobile apps like Four Square and Gowalla should be immediately apparent. Add to that the ability to pinpoint regional trends in real time search and this becomes a social media game changer.
Everybody knows a business that is still sceptical about using Twitter. But when they see they have the power to follow and influence social media conversation in their specific target markets using Local Trends, I think even the sceptics could be convinced to start using Twitter as a full time marketing channel.
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