Bing’s webmaster tool – todays opinion

Posted on 1 September, 2010 by Adrian
Bing bong

Bing bong - Sites gone

I am wanting Bing to be good and then be able to convince the consumers to enable a more competitive, less Google dominated world.

They make large leaps forward, then fail in a few things. As of today I only have 6 pages of this site in the Bing index. My site is relatively small and is like therapy to me, so not that important really, but I use it to test the benefits and putting verification of my employers sites into a future release. So, what were todays woes?

Verifying my site

I logged in with my Hotmail account, added my account, clicked the right buttons etc. Added this site to the list >> downloaded their XML file >> Uploaded it to my server >> Pressed Verify >> FAIL.

After reading a few forums, the best advice seemed to be to delete the entry and add it again. Then woe behold it instantly could now find its own BingSiteAuth.xml file. When you are in there, its not too shabby. It has most of the features of Google’s own webmaster tool including crawl, errors reports, traffic summary and my favourite “Index Explorer”. Will play some more in due course. And even more if consumers start to use Bing for their daily quantity of searches.

So, I am now in. But I need to work on…

Indexation

If you don’t have your site/page in the search engines index you don’t even have a chance. So, I have 6 pages, that is only <5% of my pages. This kind of quantity is about the same for my employer, and we have >1mm pages worthy of inclusion. There is a a neat little tool called “Index Explorer” that in a directory drill down view, shows you all the pages they have found at some point. And you can filter by status code, date etc etc. You can also submit URLs manually, but only 10 a day and up-to 50 a month! My next line of enquiry was where to submit my sitemap. I could not find this information inside the tool at all. I found it via a Bing search on their log-in page. And for convenience here is how to do it.

How to submit your sitemap to Bing

Step 1: Copy and paste the entire URL below as a single URL into the address bar of your browser:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

Step 2: Change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name

Step 3: Press ENTER

So, I pasted

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.adrianland.co.uk/sitemap.xml

… and now I wait

Bing are so close to helping webmasters, then hopefully their index will actually update!
And then users will consider them relevant aswell as aesthetically pleasing. Keep going Team Bing, not much longer to wait now!

Posted in SEO | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Anybody can use Google maps now !

Posted on 26 August, 2010 by Adrian

Just testing a new plugin, which allows fair weather codes to now use Google maps and Google Maps-Streetview This Streetview shows Trafalgar Square, London. UK.

I do like the fact that you can still interact, move around. But the sweet thing is that it overlays pictures from its other service. Just think if you run any site that could need a map or colourful supplementary information then now its in all of our reaches!

Trafalgar Square, London, UK

If you need to find this on a map look here.

London, UK
Posted in Fun things | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

HTML5 – w3c compliant post – hoorah!

Posted on 24 August, 2010 by Adrian

I was very pleased to see that my posts are actually HTML5 compliant.

The validation is specifically for my “How to make a simple Waterfall chart” post.

W3C validation

Whoop - most posts W3C validate

I genuinely believe that in the future that code segmentation/html5/microformats are going to be really important. Especially for e-commerce large sites. If there is only so much PageRank to go around, and this means the depth and aggressiveness of crawl, you need to make it as easy as possible. That way they can prioritize and understand what you have available.

In terms of the validation. I think I have to give all of the credit to the theme team. But at least I haven’t broken it. And I only had to turn off one plugin that wasn’t compliant (and my edits broke it) to get there!

Posted in How to | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How to make a simple positive “Waterfall chart”

Posted on 23 August, 2010 by Adrian

If you ever need to produce “blue sky” ideas or have to explain causality then a waterfall chart can be a great way to show that graphically. Especially in the less slides in a deck is good world.

I had to do one of these the other day. I was given a cryptic old workbook from finance, which would take longer to cut & paste/decipher than to actually teach myself how to do it. Plus, it was too complicated for what I needed anyway.

I had to make a simple, “if I had to reach a target” visual representation. So, I searched around on the inter-web and came across some mathematician level answers for complicated graphs or utter rubbish. Based on this and the bits I could understand I found my own way.

I am sure there are other ways from people smarter than me. But, I thought I would share my simple waterfall how to guide.

Step by step to make your simple positive “Waterfall chart”

  • Have your starting point, e.g. current run-rate in row 2, column 3 (see figure 1)
  • List out all your activities you intend to do, to move towards the target with incremental value. So activities in column 1 and values e.g. incremental orders in column 3
  • Put your target Row 8, column 3
  • In row7, column 3 work out the difference/gap if applicable to your story
  • Column 2 is now for the “height buffer”, which will be formatted out later on. This should just be the cumulative total to effectively suspend your real data (column 3). Will make sense in a minute
  • Plot your stacked bar graph. (See figure 2)
Waterfall data sample data

Figure 1. Sample data


Waterfall chart - almost there

Figure 2. Half way there

Now you need to remove the column 2 buffer data from VIEW

  • Highlight and delete the legend
  • Right click and format the target column to make a different colour
  • Right click on the ‘buffer’ series and “format data series” to “No Fill” and “No line colour”
  • Optional extras may include the colour of any difference (if any), data labels or lines to aid digesting

Your graph should now look a bit like this. (See figure 3)

Sample waterfall chart

Figure 3. Ta-dah - Waterfall chart ready for your formatting

From now on you can customise it any way you want. Add any kind of title etc and generally put it into your house style.

But I think you will agree, it is a very simple way to represent data in a single chart. And it will make you look like a pro. That is how I make a simple, positive waterfall style graph. Hope it works for you too.

Posted in How to | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Bing & Yahoo search alliance – migration has started for PPC

Posted on 19 August, 2010 by Adrian
Bing bong

Bing bong

If you are running any search campaigns in the USA or Canada you should be aware that this week that Bing is starting to take over the natural search on “Yahoo search” results.

Once this has taken place, in their own words

“Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada”.

If you are running US or Canadian Paid Search on Yahoo they also inform us that there is a transition tool available to help you migrate your account over to the Bing interface. You will be invited over the next few weeks if you are an existing advertiser.

If you wish to have a sneak preview of their beta tool, you can see it here –>The Microsoft transition tool

Posted in SEM | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment