We don’t always cover search industry news as we’d rather not just repeat what the other blogs are saying. Today’s a bit different though, the story of Microsoft and Yahoo!’s new 10-year search agreement deal is massive news!

Image credit: gnal

In case you’ve managed to miss it, here’s the latest news from around the blogosphere:

• It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search – Search Engine Land
• Live Blogging The MSFT – YHOO Search Press Conference – Search Engine Land
• Microsoft, Yahoo Search Deal is Official – Search Engine Journal
• Yahoo Search Powered By Microsoft Bing: What SEMs Need To Know – Search Engine Roundtable
• Five things you need to know about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal – Brand Republic
• Does Bing/Yahoo Click-Through beats Google’s? – Search Cowboys
• Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal – BBC

Continue Reading »

Microsoft has proudly announced the addition of something that looks very similar to Google sitelinks to their search results.

In fact if I was Google I would be digging out the patent they have that shows how these results are generated and thinking hard about whether to challenge how Microsoft is doing this.

One commenter put it quite well after the announcement:

This question may seem like a no-brainer, but actually, the answer is not necessarily yes in all circumstances. If any of the following examples apply to you’re website, you may not be in need of an search engine optimization campaign right now:

• You have a website that you really don’t want strangers to find, such as a training tool for your employees, a classroom tool for your students or some sort of communications platform/blog which is intended for employee’s or family members only.
• You already have a website which is ranking well, and you’re fully satisfied with your sales, website conversions, and incoming inquiries, and you don’t want to rock the boat.
• You’re in a big hurry—say, you’ll go out of business without a major upswing in revenue in the next couple of months. This is not to say that SEO can’t help you, but good SEO takes time. You may need to focus your energies elsewhere right now.
• Your site is going to be completely rebuilt or redesigned in the next couple of months. If that’s the case, be sure to incorporate SEO tactics from the outset. Anybody can have a go at SEO, and i would always encourage you to do some research and try the SEO for your site yourself, but if you really don’t have the time, and want your new website in expert hands, consider hiring an SEO agency to work with your web designer from the outset. Continue Reading »

If you now perform a link: command search on Windows Live/MSN/Live.com, or whatever it’s called, you now get a list of regular search results instead.

I’ve just noticed a search for link:http://www.live.com appearing in the website stats as my original post about the Live.com link command being broken is currently ranking at number one for this, maybe it’s worth optimising for link searches too now to get some extra traffic!

The live.com backlink search seems to be broken at the moment, any link: command query, for example link:http://www.msn.com is bringing up the following error:

“XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2F
www.msn.com&mkt=en-gb&FORM=LVCP&go.x=23&go.y=12&go=Search
Line Number 1, Column 1:”

Google, Yahoo and MSN yesterday officially agreed to all support the sitemap 0.90 protocol, for more information please read the search engines united story at the official Google blog.