The MSN Live Cashback program is called “Search Perks” (www.getsearchperks.com) — which is usable only in Internet Explorer (sorry Firefox).

MSN Live’s new promotion rewards visitors that use Live Search with tickets redeemable for various prizes including airline miles, music downloads and even xBox accessories.

Here’s how Search Perks works:

• Get 500 tickets just by signing up and downloading the Perk Counter
• Start searching using Live Search at Live.com and MSN.com, or on Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger
• For every search (up to 25 per day), you’ll earn a ticket towards great prizes
• Stay tuned for additional ways to earn tickets once you join the promotion
• Redeem your tickets for prizes once the promotion ends on April 15, 2009

The deadline to register for MSN Live’s Search Perks is December 31st, 2008. This is just one of the many marketing attempts that are coming out of Redmond, WA. We have all seen the Seinfeld episodes that are targeted towards Apple, now Microsoft is trying to win search engine share by rewarding users with free gifts.

- Nicholas Abramovic

Nicholas has always found MSN Live to give accurate search results and is now excited to get rewarded for using MSN Live.

Up until recently, Google has recommended that webmasters build links to their sites, and to use directories.  They had these two bullets in the guidelines:

• Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

These used to be part of the webmast guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

With Google removing these, does that mean they do not want webmasters to build links, or that you should not use web directories to build links?  Does this mean that Yahoo directory, DMOZ and other authoritative directories are no longer trusted?

(more…)

One of the most common SEO recommendations these days is to use an XML site map file.  But how important is a site map file for SEO?

An XML site map is a file you place on your website that lists some or all of the pages in your site.  The idea is that search engine spiders can read the site map file(s), and locate all of your pages so they can be indexed.  You can also give some useful information such as the relative priority of pages for crawling.  XML site map files are used by all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.  For details on implementing sitemap files, see http://www.sitemaps.org/

So back to the question:  How important are XML site map files?

The short answer is, like in so much of SEO:  It depends.

The real answer goes back to the purpose of sitemap files:  To help search engines find and crawl the pages on your website, and to do so efficiently.  XML site map files do not have any direct impact on rankings.  They only help search engines find pages.

For some search engines, such as Google, sitemap files are used for one other purpose:  to help establish the “canonical” URL for content that is served under multiple URLS, and for deterining what URL to index when duplicate content is found.  This can be very important if your site uses session IDs or other parameters in URLs, or serves the same content under different sections of the site. 

Thus, the only time sitemap files will change your rankings is in how they help find pages sooner, or to find pages that can’t otherwise be found on your site by crawling links.  It may also speed resolution of which URL to index in cases of duplicate content.  It won’t actually increase rankings — it may just get them to rank sooner.

If your website does not change too often and is well structured, with HTML links that search engines can easily follow to find all of your pages, then using an XML site map file will probably make no real difference at all in rankings. 

So when should you use XML site maps?  Here are some examples:

1. If your site is very large, you might use XML site map files to guide search engines to those pages that are new or change frequently so they are indexed sooner.  This is useful even if your site is well structured for spidering.
2. If your site has pages that are behind a search function, login, or other barrier to crawling by search engine spiders, then a sitemap file can get all of your content indexed.  This is a primary purpose of site map files:  to help find content that can’t be found by crawling.  Keep in mind, however, that a major disadvantage here is that these pages will generally have little or no page rank, since there is no internal page rank “flow” to the pages.
3. If your site has lots of issues with session IDs, dynamic URLs and duplicate content, then an XML site map file can help search engines to quickly determine the canonical URL for the content.  This can speed indexing and ensure the canonical URL is shown in search results.  Of course, if your site has these types of issues, you should work on them, but an XML site map file can help in the interrim.
4. If your website has frequent new or changed content, you can use site map files to guide search engines to crawling those new pages first.  Simply use the priority field in the sitemap records.  Note that in this case you would only need to list new/changed pages.  Removing a page from a sitemap file will have no impact once the page is found and initially indexed.

In general, it is a good idea to have an XML site map file.  It helps search engines find all your good content, and you can use the priority field to help them discover and index new/changed content more quickly.  However, don’t expect a big change in rankings just because you use a site map file.  Think of it as a “best practice” that is part of your overall SEO strategy.

When your website is down for maintenance or other outages, what should you return to search engine spiders that try to crawl your site?  Returning a “maintenance page” could cause problems if they take your maintenance page content and put that in the index.  You may suddenly lose all your rankings you worked hard to achieve.  Of course, when the search engines come back, they will find your actual content again, but your SEO rankings and traffic will suffer in the mean time.

There are lots of “wrong” ways to handle maintenance mode.  These include:

1. Return a maintenance message using an HTTP 200 response code (gives the search engines new content for the page, which they may try to index, messing up your search rankings).
2. Returning a 404 Not Found error (tells the search engine your page is gone — good by indexing!).
3. Don’t respond at all (indicates your site is down — bad for users, but also tells search engines your site is unreliable and deserves less trust).  Of course, if your server or network are hard down, this is what will happen anyway, but if you can try to avoid this.
4. Return a redirect to other content, whether 301, 302, JavaScript or meta refresh (confuses the search engine as to what the real content is, just like a maintenance page using a 200 response code).

So, what is the best response to return when your site is in maintenance mode?

You should use an HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response for all pages that cannot be served in their normal mode.   This tells the search engines to ignore this response, keep the current cache and indexing they have for that page, and come back later for a fresh copy.

Note that it is important to serve this response for all pages that are unavailable.

A PHP example of an HTTP 503 response is as follows:

<?php
header (’HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable’);
?>
<html><head>
<title>Our website is temporarily unavailable</title>
</head><body>
Our apologies, our website is temporarily unavailable.  Please return in a few minutes.
<p>
Thank you!
</body></html>

By using the HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response code, you can avoid all sorts of issues with search engines reacting the wrong way, and preserve your SEO rankings over site outages.

John Erickson
www.leadqual.com

Recently I had a customer who had many of their pages missing from the Google index, including the home page and all other top level pages.  The home page was indexed, but there was no cache for it, and the title and snippet were from some other source, not the current home page.  It appeared that somehow their pages were being ignored by Google, or they had incurred some kind of penalty.  The pages were indexed fine by Yahoo and MSN, so this was something specific to Google.

We looked carefully at many things to find the problem, including robots.txt, use of redirects on the root URL, XML site map files, linking, use of session IDs, etc etc.  Finally, we isolated the problem: a piece of JavaScript code that conditionally redirected the user to a test page.  Normally the JavaScript variable would not trigger this redirection, but it appears Google did not trust the code, and interpreted this as a cloaking/spam technique where  users are redirected to a different page and do not see what the search engines see.

The code was something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var test=”yes”;
if (test!= “yes”) {
document.write(”<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0;URL=http://www.mysite.com/testing/’ />”); }
</script>

This code was was on all pages that were not indexed, and not present on those pages that were indexed.  When we removed this code, the pages started to get back into the index within hours, and already over 1,500 pages have been added to the index.   Thus it was obvious this was the culprit, even though this was just an innocent way of making it easy to show a test page with a simple variable change.

Normally you would not expect a search engine, even Google, to  follow this code.  It is a meta refresh dynamically written by a JavaScript document.write() command.  However, Google spam filters look for “tricky” spam techniques, and they obviously evaluated this code, and did not trust the conditional check on the “test” variable.  I think what happened was that they always followed the meta refresh and indexed that page instead of each original page.  Ouch!

Google has been very clear that their algorithms look for spam techniques that try to fool them.  For example, see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/

I suspect there are many other ways to get your pages banned or penalized by search engines.  It appears that Google is using some very sophisticated techniques, though not quite sophisticated enough in our case!

So, if your pages are missing or removed from search engine indexes, look carefully at any areas where you have JavaScript-controlled redirects, meta refresh commands or other techniques that might be interpreted as spam attempts.

John Erickson
LeadQual