Microsoft & MSN

Microsoft becomes domain name registrar

Thursday, July 12th, 2007 | Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

The company was added to the list of accredited domain name registrars by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) last week, allowing it to purchase domain name directly and for trade price.

However, that is unlikely to be the real reason for the software giant’s effort. Microsoft said in a statement that the accreditation “will be helpful and educational for us as policies evolve and we introduce new and improved Internet-based services to our customers… Becoming an ICANN-accredited registrar is just one of many ways we can improve our customers’ online and search experience,” a statement read.

The fact is that becoming a domain registrar brings a number of advantages, including access to rapidly updated databases over domain ownership, that Internet companies are increasingly seeing as providing a competitive advantage. Google for example became a registrar so it could quickly determine when domain changed hands and then adjust their search ranking accordingly.

Microsoft’s decision is probably related to its Office Live product, which is expected to emerge from its beta testing period later this month, according to Rich Miller, an analyst with Internet research firm Netcraft. Microsoft offers free domain name registration to Office Live users and to date the company has been using Melbourne IT for this service. By becoming a registrar in its own right, Microsoft could cut costs, Miller said.

Recently AOL has started attracting business by offering free domain names, calculating that the $6 cost will be more than pay back over time through customer loyalty.

Meanwhile, Microsoft can now buy .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name and .pro top-level domains at cost price.

Windows Live Hotmail Debuts

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

Hotmail, perhaps the first major success of Web 1.0, has evolved.

Microsoft has announced the launch of Windows Live Hotmail globally in 36 languages, complete with AJAX goodness.
live
The new service has been built to be a vast improvement over the previous Hotmail offering, incorporating input from more than 20 million beta testers. However todays offering is only the move from beta to roll out.

We’ve covered Windows Live Hotmail previously: back in February Michael Arrington took a look at the then beta service and the results weren’t positive, the new Hotmail ranking third behind Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Windows Live Hotmail launches with an initial 30 million users, with over 250 million additional users to be bought across in the coming months.

The new Hotmail is built on completely new code and marks the continued consolidation around the Windows Live brand.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be releasing a new free mail client meant to replace Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live desktop. The new client is called Windows Live Mail and will be a desktop client that provides Hotmail’s feature set locally on a users desktop. It will also support management of non Hotmail accounts.

There is some added benefits of logging into the new Hotmail; support is built in to allow Instant Messaging of contacts, or VOIP call contacts, with one click, which will also tie in with the Microsofts desktop IM platform.

My only question is why didn’t Microsoft build on the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight. Instead of promoting a platform that has such wonderful potential, Microsoft has seemingly ignored it with Hotmail. I’m sure in the coming months that others will be more willing to utilize the potential of Silverlight than Microsoft is.

Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, MSN adCenter, Microsoft & MSN | 1 Comment

Is Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its terms of service for adCenter, with some key changes:

Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.

Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.

In a thread discussing the changes in the Search Engine Watch forums, user Mel66 notes that she’s seen some other uses of “criteria other than keyword searches.” Apparently, Microsoft is running ads through IntelliTXT, the much-maligned inline text ad provider. Mel66 clicked through on the ad to find it pointed to a search results page with one of her PPC keywords on it, which she believes is related to a recent drop in performance of those ads:

I wondered why we had a pocket of keywords with huge leaps in clicks and no resultant increases in conversions. This sucks. Is MSN really so desperate for traffic that they’ve resorted to running crappy ads for their own search results???
What this amounts to in my book is MSN running their own garbitrage ads. You click on an ad and get a page with more ads on it. This is bad, bad, bad, folks.

Mel66, whose real name is Melissa Mackey, is the search marketing director for MagazineLine, the magazine subscription division of American Collegiate Marketing. Mackey happened across a publisher site running IntelliTXT ads, and one of the keywords was “magazine,” which is one of the keywords Mackey targets in her adCenter campaigns.

The IntelliTXT ad included a Live Search box, with “magazine” pre-filled, which links to the Live Search results page for the keyword:

msn

The ad is part of a campaign by Microsoft to bring new users to Live Search by highlighting the relevance of certain queries.

“We turned off Yahoo’s content network over a year ago, partly because of IntelliTXT and its poor results,” Mackey told SEW. “What makes this even worse than that is that it looks like MSN considers this type of ad to be search, not content. We have opted out of MSN’s content network.”

Yahoo and Microsoft Planning Merger Talks?

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN, Yahoo | 1 Comment

We’ve seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google’s plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we’ve got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It’s being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there’s not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It’s not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester’s Charlene Li says it’s a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. “Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won’t be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared.”

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. “If it doesn’t, both Yahoo and MSN will die,” he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: “Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It’s not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions.”

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

Five dangerous SEO tools in the hands of the New optimizer

Monday, April 23rd, 2007 | Google, Internet Marketing, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Yahoo | No Comments

You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.

Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.

Alexa Ranking
Alexa ranking isn’t perfect. In fact, it is very far from it because of the way it measures a site’s traffic… by only counting those who are visiting the site with either an Alexa toolbar or an Alexa browser plugin. So numbers can be manipulated in so many ways to make the site’s Alexa rank seem better or worse than it should.

Google PageRank
What’s your PageRank? Unfortunately, while Google PR does have its uses, many people place too much importance on what number is in that little green bar, particularly when it goes up or down with those infrequent PageRank updates. And some site owners seem more obsessed with what their PR is rather than what their actual rankings are. Funny that, considering only one is usually related to ROI, unless you happen to be selling text links!

Automated Rank Checkers
A cringe worthy situation is when you are talking about the site’s rankings with your client and he says “Oh yes, I’ve been running a program to check our rankings every hour on our top list of fifty keywords so I can check how you are doing on an hourly basis.” So not only does your client feel the need to analyze how you are doing on an hourly basis, but also those automated queries are also one of the thou shalt not do commandments in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Oops.

Site:
When companies are paying top dollar for their search engine optimization, they can become a little bit obsessed with how many pages they have indexed, even when there are obvious problems with Google’s site search at the moment using site: such as the 260 error. And of course, there are fluctuations depending on what dataserver is hit or even the physical location of the surfer.

Link:
Which brings us to checking backlinks in Google (or Yahoo). Backlinks are notoriously slow at updating in Google using the link: command, and are even more notorious for being so incomplete… which is a good thing if you have snoopy competitors wanting to mimic your backlink campaigns for their own sites. But for a client wanting to see the fruits of your linking efforts (or to see what their link budget is paying for), it can definitely seem like things just aren’t happening.

These are definitely the tools that SEOs love to hate, although granted, each of them still offers at least a grain of usefulness even today. Yes, we all check PageRank, but just because a competitor has a PR6 site doesn’t mean they are ranking better than your PR4 or PR5 site. Likewise, a site with an Alexa ranking of 1000 may have far less traffic than an Alexa 10,000 or 100,000 site or may convert much worse. So while they have their uses, they should never be viewed as a be all, end all of search engine optimization.

At the end of the day, all that really matters is what position you are in the search engines for your chosen keywords and how much traffic is being driven to your site, not if you are in the Alexa top 1000 or if Google says you have 260 pages indexed. So when someone talks about how great (or poor) their Alexa, PageRank, backlink numbers or how many pages they have indexed, remind them that it is traffic that brings in the money at the end of the day and that is where the optimization focus should be.

Is link bait dying as a search engine optimization technique?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Google, Link Building, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

Link bait has two primary uses for webmasters looking to promote a site. First is the initial wave of traffic that a hot link baited article can bring. When people start linking and talking about your article, the traffic comes albeit through linkage from other blogs, through social media such as Digg and through blog search engines such as Technorati. However, within a day or two, this traffic trickles off to next to nothing.

Then comes the true SEO aspect of a successful link bait article… the boost that all those deep links give to the page and the site overall. This helps the blog rank higher in the search engines and contributes to increasing PageRank. It is an extremely useful technique… in fact, there are search engine optimization companies that only take on clients who have good link bait-ability.

But like any hot SEO technique, as soon as it starts getting done to death - as arguably link bait is now - the powers that be at Google simply turn one of those many shiny knobs and suddenly the technique starts to count less and less in the serps until those link bait links don’t seem to add anything at all. Or worse, sites utilizing it to an extreme level get penalized.

So is link bait as an SEO technique at the end of its days? Definitely. And the writing has been on the wall for several months now.

Remember the whole miserable failure Google bombing? With Google bombing, a large number of bloggers link to the same page with the identical anchor text so that the destination page will (hopefully) rank for their chosen phrase. Well, Google tweaked their algo so that Google bombing would no longer impact the search results (although Google bombing is ironically alive and well in Yahoo & MSN).

So if Google can combat Google bombing, which is a lot of bloggers linking to the same page within a short time frame, who is to say that they won’t apply the same thing to trip a filter or penalty when a blog has a large number of deep links coming into a single page in a short period of time? Link bait would still work well for the social aspect of it, but for Google at least, the ranking boost would no longer factor into it.

If link bait stopped working as a SEO technique, would people still do it? You bet. There is definitely the ego boost and the stardust factor people get when everyone is linking to them and talking about what they wrote. There will still be those who get their kicks from seeing how many times they can make the front page of Digg in a week or if they can be the first to blog about some exploit in Google or Yahoo that gets everyone saying how great they are. So from that perspective, link baiting will be around for a long time to come.

And my gut feeling? It is only a matter of time - if it hasn’t started already, that is. It could be a sudden thing that gets all the bloggers screaming at once, but I suspect it would be more of a gradual dampening, something that could easily be attributed to one of the few dozen other algo components that make up the Google secret sauce. But my guess is this time next year, link baiting will be dead as a search engine optimization technique.

Do you really need meta tags?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Google, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

A couple of years ago, using meta tags definitely fell out of style. They went from being near the top of every search engine optimiser’s to do list to being dropped right off the bottom and added to a site more as an afterthought than a SEO technique. True, they stopped being the sure-fire SEO technique they were several years ago, but should they really have been relegated to non-existence? Definitely not.

Even today, however, marketers are confused about what meta tags are actually good for, especially with so many people saying meta tags are useless and not to add them. But then add to that the fact that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have stepped up to add new meta tags into the mix in the past year to allow webmasters to customize how their sites are displayed in the search results. So here is what meta tags are still useful for in 2007, and why you should be using them.

First and foremost, Google sometimes uses the description you place in the meta description tag as the snippet when certain criteria is met. This sometimes includes site search or keyword searches when keyword(s) that are searched for also are contained within the meta description.

The meta robots tag is useful for excluding certain pages from being indexed by bots. When you don’t want to use the robots.txt file for excluding bots, such as you don’t want to alert competitors to a specific directory you have on you site, the robots meta tag comes in quite handy. It is also good for those who are still terrified of somehow screwing up a robots.txt file and inadvertently blocking all the bots from an entire site, even though there are plenty of robots.txt checkers out there now.

There is also the fairly new NOODP tag. If your site is listed in the ODP directory (aka DMOZ) with a less-than-desirable description, using the ODP tag will tell MSN (which started this one), Google and Yahoo that you prefer that description not be used for your snippet.

Likewise, Yahoo also allows webmasters to use the NOYDIR meta tag, which tells Yahoo to not use your Yahoo Directory description as the snippet in Yahoo search results.

Preventing a cache copy being taken is another use for meta tags. While this tag is definitely useful in certain circumstances, do keep in mind that using no-cache can be a signal of spam, since most spammers prefer you see what they serve you and not what they actually dished up to Google (or Yahoo or MSN) to get there.

Using AdSense? There is definite evidence that your meta description and keywords can be an influential factor in ad targeting, so using this can help to get highly targeted ads.

In the grand scheme of things, you can leave all meta tags off your website and still rank well in the major search engines. But they can help in the search results, and even if it just gives you the smallest boost in your rankings, it is worth adding them to your page. But meta tags still have their uses, even if it isn’t a strong part of the ranking algorithm, so it is worth taking the extra 30 seconds and adding any relevant meta tags to your page when you create it, or spending some time to go through an older site without any meta’s and adding them.

Microsoft extends Vista bulk license discount to Europe

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 | Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

Microsoft is extending discounts for multiple Vista licenses to small businesses and home users in Europe.

Nick White, product manager on the Vista launch team, revealed the extension to Europe of the Windows Vista Additional License program in his blog.

The bulk license discount, which Microsoft made available to U.S. customers in February and extended to European customers on Monday, allows small businesses and home users to install the same edition of a previously purchased Windows Vista operating system on additional computers. Customers can purchase up to five additional licenses at 10 percent off the suggested retail price.

Comments posted on White’s blog show that some users still find Vista too expensive.

“I’m willing to give Vista a go. Only, however, if the family discount is extended to the U.K. in June, when the current limited-time U.S. only offer expires,” one United Kingdom-based reader of White’s blog said. “Otherwise, it’s way too damned expensive for the three PCs I have. Ten percent per additional license is just not enough of a ’sweet deal’ for me.”

The family discount, which enables people purchasing Windows Vista Ultimate to buy up to two licenses of Vista Home Premium for $49.99 each, is currently unavailable in the United Kingdom.

Another blog response pointed out that many U.S. retailers already offer Vista at 10 percent below list price.

“Honestly, it leaves much to be desired–and I speak not as a Linux or Apple zealot–especially as you can easily find Vista discounted by 5 (percent) to 7 percent at Amazon.com or marked down by about that much at (U.S.) retail stores like Best Buy,” the posting said. “Ten percent isn’t worth it, unless you are completely incapable of comparison shopping–or you live 100 miles from the nearest computer store, and you’re on metered dial-up.”

In Europe, the Windows Vista Additional License program is currently available online only.

Microsoft Launches Its New Video Community

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

Microsoft has launched it’s answer to youtube at http://soapbox.msn.com/ using flash video as it’s format.

Small pages rank best, Not a Good Thing

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 | Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

Has anyone else noticed that very small pages rank highest in MSN? This could explain why doorways and blogspots rank so well. To test this, I reduced text on my homepage down to just a paragraph or so, with links to my internal pages. The content reduced from 22k to about 5k. Within 2 days, the page went from page 5 to page 1 for a competitive phrase. This is a bad thing to me because it devalues content. Their task should be to index the world’s content/information. Not the world’s blurbs and doorways. Simple pages designed to sell something are out ranking articles and informative pages. Why?

Of course this experiment comes at a price: reducing the content within a document just to rank better on MSN means ranking on fewer longtail phrases in Google (since Google actually indexes and ranks pages based on content), thus I am seeing a sharp drop in traffic overall (down 50% from the previous 3 Sundays). This drop also implies that despite having wonderful rankings in MSN, their traffic levels are simply not worth the time and energy right now. Time to revert the page back to my pre-experiment content.

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