SERP Experts

If you haven’t been busy at SES in our neck of the woods this week, you might have noticed we’ve been rolling out fresh updates to our crawl, index and ranking systems — ones that are relatively significant for webmasters.

In response to feedback from the community, we’re reducing our crawling machines by a significant amount with this update, so you might have observed a significant reduction in crawl load from us along with fewer machine IP addresses hitting you over the last few days.

The new crawler continues to improve comprehensiveness and freshness of coverage while also enhancing crawl efficiency, which reduces spurious load on websites.

We had a brief bout of increased crawl load while testing and rolling out updates, like support for ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer, announced yesterday. Don’t fret, though, if you’re concerned about seeing an increased load. We’ve initiated efforts and established policies internally to ensure this doesn’t happen, even temporarily, in the future.

Thanks and keep the feedback coming.
Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

The MSN AdLabs tools aren’t popularly mentioned in the SEO world, but they’re incredibly valuable, and from what I’ve seen, pretty accurate.

• Demographics of your competitors’ sites - http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
• Detect commercial intent - http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx
• Find “similar” keywords - http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
• Cool results clustering (determine what pages are related) - http://adlab.msn.com/SRC/SRC.aspx
• Seasonal keyword forecasting - http://adlab.msn.com/Forecast/
• Content categorization - http://adlab.msn.com/kts/CCAT.aspx
• Search funnel data (useful to understand a query path) - http://adlab.msn.com/SearchFunnel/

The full list is here - http://adlab.msn.com/default.aspx - note that you need to use IE for many of these, as it breaks down in Firefox

I’ve spent a lot of time running searches a Live.com this week and noticed that, more than any of the other engines, Live seems to rank domains and pages that have the keywords in the URL, and the domain name. This appears to work equally effectively for subdomains, so using a subdomain strategy when targeting Live in particular may be a great way to go. Of course, they’re one of the most active engines about algo shifts, so it may not last for long, but its certainly effective right now.

This is an easy one - it’s not perfect, but it will give you a fairly good idea of which pages on your site have the most “juice” with each of the engines. Use the query format - site:yourdomain.com inurl:www (sorry folks who don’t use the www). Here’s some examples:

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aserpexperts.com+inurl%3Awww (I note that this matches up almost exactly with the data webmaster central gives me for pages with the most links)
• http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Aserpexperts.com+inurl%3Awww - Yahoo! has a bit of a different opinion (but still looks very relevant)
• http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Aserpexperts.com+www - at Live.com, they don’t allow the “inurl” operator, so you can just use “www” which may skew things a bit, but you’re still likely to see many of the most important pages first

This can be very useful for figuring out where your high link juice pages are and re-directing some of the goodness over to places that need it.

The folks inside the search engines and studying the local search space seem to agree - putting your business’ address at the footer (or header) on every page of your site is a great way to pull in local search traffic. Not only does it help the engines to identify your location more properly, it’s also terrific to get local modifiers into your longer tail queries. Just by having location information (particularly city & state) on the page, you might find you’re relevant and ranking for queries you never saw traffic from before.