An update to Bing’s webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine’s view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not.

Bing’s new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site is displayed for the wrong things, and what was actually clicked. However, since it doesn’t show the URL that was displayed or your position in the results (you can preform an actual search to figure this out), you don’t have a compete picture of what content is working and what isn’t.

Crawl errors are recorded and graphed, but Bing provides no specifics to guide you as to what the errant links are or what they are linked from. And the tool lacks reports for incoming links, linked phrases, and ranking information.

In summary, Bing’s new interface is slicker looking than the previous product and has some attractive charts. However I am hoping this is just the first pass and that Bing will flow-in additional information to expose the critical details that are currently missing.

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Google added a feature to Webmaster Tools yesterday that I hope will find its way in to Business Listings and other services. Now, if you are verified owner of a website, you can simply add additional users to the Webmaster Tools account (through the verify link). This means site owners can add individuals that do development, marketing or optimization, without having to upload additional files or edit pages. This greatly simplifies things, giving owners a simple way to remove this access.

More on this from Google here

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It is often hard to tell what is a real penalty as there can be may causes for your content to drop in the search engine result pages (SERPs). There are things that should be obvious, like changes in SERPs that co-inside with changes you made to the site. However, often results don’t directly co-inside with changes and therefore it can be difficult to track back.

It can be challenging to discover if:

• You’ve got a true penalty
• You’ve been outranked according to the current algorithm
• It’s a Google bug (from algorithm tweaks)

Simple Checks Include:

1. Is your robots.text page restricting access?
2. Has an errant noindex or no-follow tag found its way to a section of your site?
3. Have you checked Google’s webmaster tools for error messages?
4. Have you checked WebmasterWorld to see if recent changes to the algorithm are effecting others?

Props to “tedster” on the webmaterworld thead, this list is an excerpt from an older posting of his:

Additional checks:

1. Do your pages show with a site:example.com search?
   If they did once and they do not now, this is most likely a ban – the most extreme kind of penalty. It’s becoming quite rare to be completely banned rather than penalized – usually those who are banned know what they’ve been doing. Technical problems with your site, or some times Google may be at fault.
2. Does your site still rank #1 for a search on your domain name example.com?
   If so, but your other important search rankings ALL slipped badly, this is often a sign of a penalty. Study up on the posts in our Hot Topics area for ideas.
3. Does a search for relatively unique phrases taken from your title tags return your URL relatively high?
   If so, but your principle search rankings have dropped out the bottom, you may have lost the power of a good number of your backlinks. This is not necessarily a true penalty, but if you have been a part of some backlink scheme, even unwittingly, you may have been penalized for it.

Also, check any outbound links on your pages to be sure that the site they point to is still what you intended. Other domains can change ownership (or just change their conduct) and become part of a “bad neighborhood”. If others also have access to your site, be sure that no hidden content has been added without your knowledge, especially hidden links.

Other good posts on the subject:

• Do I Have a Google Penalty?
• Am I penalized? What type of penalty do I have?
• Diagnosing a possible penalty

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Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but that have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not… this is a great place to find out.

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Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results.

Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one:

1. Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you are contemplating a site change, be mindful of your page names and extensions. If you make changes with abandon, you will loose any ranking associated with those pages and your site.  This can be specially tricky if you are moving to a content management system or changing platforms.  301 redirects are critical to this process,
   see: Never delete or rename a page.
             
2. Before you make changes, you need to be sure you don’t derail existing traffic. It’s important to know what pages are receiving traffic on your site. You want to know what terms or phrases are attracting attention. You want to know what external sites are linking to and insure there is equivalent content going forward. Review analytics data and web logs before you make changes. If you don’t have tracking in place, don’t wait to add it.  I recommend installing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools at the very least to see where you stand. You can’t tell if you have made improvements or where you may have gone wrong, unless you have some history! 
   See: Getting Started with Web Analytics Tools

Read more…

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