#if debug

Virtually every webmaster has heard of Google Webmaster Tools and use it regularly to check on the health of their site, unfortunately very few know of Live Search Webmaster Center which complements Microsoft Live Search.

Recently I wrote about the significant improvements that Live Search Webmaster Center has gone through, which has really boosted the product. To put the new enhancements through their paces, it seemed like a good idea to compare what it was displaying versus what Google Webmaster Tools was showing.

Live Search Webmaster Center showed that I didn’t have anything wrong with my robots.txt file, nor was I suffering from long and complex dynamic URLs - however I did have a handful of 404 errors through the site. Live Webmaster Center had picked up that I had linked to another site without the http:// in the href attribute, like:

• <a href=”www.domain.com/important/article/”>important article</a>

which when clicked, was delivering a 404 error on my site with a URL like:

• http://ifdebug.com/article/my-article/www.domain.com/important/article/

To my surprise, when I explored that same information within Google Webmaster Tools - they had not picked up that I had linked that article incorrectly.

Moral of the story, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While Google hadn’t picked it up or had just compensated for my mistake - simple mistakes like that may have an adverse effect on less capable search engines.

This week Google Analytics received a small upgrade - specifically related to the login process.

Until now, no matter how often you use Google Analytics, as a user you were forced to login every time you returned to the site. It frustrates users so much that if you use Google Analytics quite a lot, it became a habit to leave a window open with Google Analytics logged in just for the simplicity.

With the latest update, the Google Analytics team are saying that you no longer need to login and that the process has been streamlined. I’d argue that only part of that statement is true, you do not need to authenticate - however it isn’t streamlined.

The majority of other Google services, once you’ve authenticated once and subsequently return - it reads in your Google Account information and you immediately have access to the service. For some reason, the Google Analytics team have chosen against a consistent authentication progress that is common amongst many other Google services and the user is forced to click a button to enter.

The process won’t be streamlined until it functions like Google Mail, Google Reader and so on. I welcome the improvement - at least I no longer need to type in my account information all the time - however since they already know that I’m authenticated, I shouldn’t need to click again to re-enter the application.

In the last few days, the Live Search Webmaster blog have posted about two significant improvements to the webmaster center, how Live Search crawls your site and more detailed backlink information.

Live Search Webmaster Center now supports the following four items, which are a great help in identifying problems with your site and how Live Search is spidering your content:

• File not found (404) errors, a straight forward date stamped account of the HTTP “404 File Not Found” errors that Live Search encountered when crawling the site. Conveniently, this includes broken links within your own site and sites that you are linking to.
• Pages Blocked by Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), reported when Live Search has been prevented from indexing or displaying a cached copy of the page because of a policy in your robots exclusion protocol (REP).
• Long Dynamic URLs, reported when Live Search encounters a URL with an exceptionally long query string. These URLs have the potential to create an infinite loop for search engines due to the number of combination’s of their parameters, and are often not crawled. I haven’t come across one of these yet and so far I haven’t seen any documentation of what ‘exceptionally long’ means, so clarification on that point would be handy.
• Unsupported Content-Types, reported when a page either specifies a content-type that is not supported by Live Search, or simply doesn’t specify any content type. Examples of supported content-types are: text/html, text/xml, and application/PowerPoint.

In 2007, Microsoft removed the ability for users to drill into backlink data within Live Search. It took a long time, however that functionality has now been replaced within Live Search Webmaster Center and is looking quite promising.

Common functionality shared between the crawl information and back link data, is that Live Webmaster allows you to download the information CSV format. Possibly the best feature for a large complex site though, is that each of the above options can be filtered (search style) further by entering in a subdomain and/or directory to restrict the results to. The backlink interface additionally supports a top level domain in the search box, allowing you to isolate only back links originating from an Australian site by entering in .au.

Future Improvements

The interface doesn’t support paging of results, in case you want to step through a few pages without wanting to export information in CSV format. If you do want to download more information, there isn’t an option to export all information in a hit - you can only retrieve 1000 lines of data. I can appreciate that they don’t want to provide an ‘all’ option or that they want to limit how many can be fetched at once, however there isn’t a way to set 1000 items per page to download them and then go to the next page and download them. The other issue with the 1000 lines of data, is that there is no information on how the 1000 lines are selected. As an example, the backlink section uses the language ‘Download up to 1000 results’ - however there isn’t any indication of how the 1000 are selected.

Promising

While there is still room for improvement and really, when isnt there, I’m personally encouraged by the changes that Microsoft are making to Live Search Webmaster Center. The sooner services from Microsoft start to catch up to other services offered by the leaders - the sooner more businesses and webmasters will spend investing time into the Live Search product.

Approximately six months ago, I mentioned that I was going to conduct a small test regarding the impact that optimising the HTML <title> element has from a search engine optimisation stand point.

In December when I wrote that, #if debug was a very new site - in fact it has been online for exactly one month. It’ll come as no surprise that no one knew about the site, in fact even to this day a limited number of people know about the site. Fortunately though, I do have evidence to suggest that more know about it now than they did in December!

In the announcement, I had said that a 10% increase in traffic would have been considered a success. Given that the site was taking approximately 60 visits per week at that time - optimising the <title> attribute would need to increase that to around 65 visits to be considered a success.

In the image above, you can see if the effect of optimising the <title> element in the HTML. The change was made at the marker point directly above the 25 in “Nov 25, 2007 - Dec 1, 2007″. I’m not sure what caused the dip in traffic immediately after the change, however once it recovered - the increased traffic has been maintained or increased. The marker point second from the right delivered a whopping 67 visits for the week and as such I’m going to claim this a victory (even if it is very very small!).

In the following few months, this tiny site has grown from zero visits and has steadily been increasing month on month to a lofty figure a little over 400 visits per month! I realise that isn’t a lot of traffic by anyones measurement, however for a site that has had very little effort put in and next to no attention directed its way - it isn’t half bad.