What is spam? One could argue that spam is a multi-faceted thing. The word itself has many definitions. For example, it can be defined as a processed spiced ham and pork slathered with a gelatinous glaze food product found in a tin )it's apparently very popular in Hawai'i, don't you know?(. However,

Everybody loves a list of frequently asked questions )FAQ(. They often include tidbits of knowledge that are not easily found elsewhere, or present information in ways that often make it more understandable. The Webmaster Center team has been working hard to present more useful content through the team blog in recent months. We already have a FAQ of sorts through the Webmaster Center Help )see the Help system's left hand navigation for the Help-based FAQ(,

In August, we alerted webmasters to the news from the Microsoft Internet Information Services )IIS( team of the beta 1 release of their excellent new tool, the IIS SEO Toolkit. The public response we received was very enthusiastic and supportive. In response to many requests, we followed that up with a more detailed article explaining how the new tool is installed as an extension of IIS 7. Since that time, the tool was refreshed in a beta 2 release and, as of November 13,

We still get many questions in our blog comments, even though we try to encourage our readers to post their questions to our Webmaster Center forums )which are actually staffed to answer your questions!(. I do look through the blog comments every day and delete those that are junk )those that are empty, duplicated, offensive, and overtly spammy - see our Q&A reply on why blog comments are deleted in the 1st Webmaster Center blog Q&A post (.

In past SEM 101 articles, we've talked about the importance of inbound links to successful ranking )see "Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" - Part 1 and Part 2 (. We've already discussed many issues surrounding them, but we haven't done a dedicated post on how to be successful at link building from a search engine's perspective. Let's finally address that omission here and now. What is the point of building links? Your website is your self-representation on the Web.

Did you hear the news? Bing was recently upgraded with another set of exciting end-user features. Instead of reciting the long list of changes here, I'll just point you to the blog post in the Bing Search blog titled, " Bing's Next Chapter Begins Today ." The Bing engineering team has been focused on improving the already cool features that have made using Bing so much fun. One edit to the Bing home page has changed the way users navigate to the Toolbox page,

We've already covered in past blog articles some of the basics about how webmasters can use a file called robots.txt to control how search engine crawlers )aka bots( crawl their websites. But there is so much more to talk about with bots. So let's take a bit of a deeper dive into the subject. Topic 1: Using the proper text file encoding The robots.

The Bing team has been talking about its new crawler )aka bot(, MSNBot 2.0b, in this blog for quite some time now. We have made numerous improvements in its performance, addressed some webmaster concerns, and published detailed information on how to control the bot with a robots.txt file . Today we are announcing that the new bot is fully operational.

You've seen it. So have I. Nearly every person who has actively browsed the Web for more than 15 minutes has seen it. I'm talking about the dreaded 404 File Not Found error. When it occurs, users simply abandon their search on that site and go elsewhere. That's a potential lost sale, subscription, or download opportunity )aka conversion( for the affected site! It has been estimated that up to 10% of traffic on the Web is looking for pages that don't exist,

About eight months back , the Microsoft Research Translator team delivered an entirely unique way of delivering your website's pages to visitors who speak a different language with no development effort on your part. Unlike any other translation widget/gadget available at that time, the Translator widget was unique in that it kept your audience on your site, rather than redirecting them to a proxy translation service. Since then,

We've been really busy here at the Bing Webmaster Center blog team, pumping out new content on a regular basis to create a nice library of content on issues that matter to webmasters and online publishers . I thought I'd take a moment to catch my breath, pause on creating a new thematic article )or yet another multi-part series!( for SEM 101, and address some commonly asked questions in the blog comments. Q: Why wasn't my question in the blog comments answered? A: Well,

OK, so I totally geeked out with my recommendations on how to better secure your webmaster computing environment. As a result, I had too much material for one post and thus had to split it up into two pieces. Let's wrap up this long series of posts on malware by finishing up with the last of the security recommendations. In Part 1 of this series on malware , we discussed how to detect a malware infection on your website using tools like Bing's Webmaster Center .

We're going to diverge a bit from our regularly scheduled programming. Normally this column discusses search engine optimization )SEO( and related elements of search engine marketing )SEM(, but we're knee deep into our multi-part series on malware and we're going to begin the wrap-up with a talk about improving computer security. However, I geeked out a bit here, and the column went a bit long )yeah, even longer than usual!(,

As some of you may have experienced, our Add a site page has been unavailable in some locales for the past several days. This is not a site-wide or even a global issue. Unfortunately, this happened due to an update that uncovered a bug in the original code, which caused us to disable the page in one of our data centers. The good news is that we are testing a fix now and will be releasing it to production just as soon as we are sure it will not cause further complications.

Malware infections are no laughing matter. When they afflict your website, they can infect your customers, who won't appreciate your sharing, intentional or not )and I'm guessing it's not(! And if Bing discovers malware on your site, your listing in the Bing search engine results pages )SERPs( will either be completely omitted or the link to your site will be disabled, so when the searcher clicks on it, only a malware warning appears. All told,

As some of you may have experienced, our add a site page has been unavailable in some locals for the past several days. This is not a site-wide or even global issue. Unfortunately, this happened due to an update that uncovered a bug in the original code which caused us to disable the page in one of our Data Centers. Good news is, we are testing a fix and will be releasing it to production as soon as we are sure it will not cause further complications.

The Web is an incredible place, filled with amazing media, fascinating content, and wonderful social opportunities, and theres more of each than anyone can possibly ever consume. But unfortunately, its not a benign place. There are more than a few malefactors out there who actively seek to take over your computer for a variety of nefarious purposes. These purposes usually include turning your computer into a: Member of their computer zombie army,

When I attended both SMX Advanced in Seattle back in June and SES San Jose just a couple of weeks ago, I heard a lot of questions from webmasters about Bing, especially pertaining to search engine optimization issues. Typically these included: I want to do SEO for Bingâ€"where should I start? How is Bing different in terms of SEO? What do webmasters need to know and do? Are there any insider tips for successful ranking? I'll tackle these questions by providing some useful,

There's been some recent discussion in the SEO blogosphere asserting that Bing clicks its own adCenter ads. This has created some misunderstanding. Let's take a moment to clarify what is actually happening, and what this really means for webmasters and advertisers. The Bing team is aware of an issue shared by all search engines: paid advertising links on sites are, on occasion, crawled and indexed by search engines.

We recently published a non-SEM 101 blog post on controlling the crawl rate of MSNBot , the Bing web crawler )aka robot, or simply just bot(. That got me thinking about robots. Naturally, that led to The Robot on Lost in Space . Will Robinson , the show's precocious youngster who was a whiz at 1960s-style, clunky electronics )even though the show was supposedly set in 1997!(, was best friends with The Robot.