Show me Where these Dead Links are Coming From

Okay, here’s a snip of the new feature;

The ‘Linked From’ link triggers a nifty little lightbox type window with the sources of the faulty links. Each page listed represents each page where the invalid link was detected. They may be internal links which you’ll need to correct, or they may be links from external sources which you’ll now know exactly where they are originating from. The link source report is found under the URLs in Sitemaps errors and Not Found errors.

Don’t Ignore Your Crawl Errors

Once again, the moral here is that in this cut throat SEO game every little bit counts and if the Search Engines, in their infinite wisdom ( except ‘Live’ and it’s Anti Cloaking Bot :) ) are going to be kind enough to offer up some helpful advice, you’d be silly not to take notice. With this new feature be sure to completely audit each and every item detailed here as they all have the potential to represent a new lead, prospective client, referral or that last back link which bumps you into the next major PR increment. Keep your stick on the ice and don’t ignore your broken links!

So while attempting to locate a particular song which I carry only remnants of a chorus in my mind, I noticed that YouTube wasn’t being very helpful this morning. At 7:22am PST I was struck with a bout of YouTubeLessNess !! I assumed that it was just my local net access but after running the Head Request Viewer at the SEO Tools section I was reaffirmed that no, it wasn’t my connection, the video sharing behemoth and left hand to Google was in fact ‘unavailable’. I’m sure the blogoshpere will be going ape about this today. Check out these snaps.

So just a quickie this morning hoping to pull an early post on this particular item. Have a fantastic Day. Perhaps global productivity will suddenly surge due to the lack of YouTube. Cheers!

-J

The ‘Question’ related to the rash of bizarre search referrals that MSN was spreading around earlier this year.

The question was pretty much ‘where the heck is all of this search traffic coming from suddenly?’. Okay, suddenly meaning towards the end of August of this year, just like everyone else. So for an SEO Firm getting hits for the keyword ’search’, this could appear pretty flattering. Did I do something magical to suddenly send the MSNLive Bot into heat? Did someone hijack a PPC campain and we’re going to get a nasty bill from the folks at MSN Adcenter? After playing with those ideas for three to four seconds, it became brutally obvious that this was just bogus bot traffic masking itself with a search referral, thus triggering an entry into our Search Metrics. If I didn’t know any better I could possibly call that cloaking… The plot thickens. After spending some time reflecting on our Enquisite data a few items still didn’t ad up.

1. Enquisite was tagging this traffic as arriving from MSN Live. No one could recreate a human click from this engine using ’search’.
2. It was always the same keyword.
3. The same keyword hit dozens of alternate URL’s. One would think that specific traffic, though not very focused, would generally arrive at a single related page. (same phrase, same search engine)

The geo tagging was returning an ‘unresolved’ so I grabbed the raw logs and compared the referring strings. Here are the bits that matter.

• 65.55.165.51 (Ip of the ’searcher’)
• http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP (Appears to be the referring SERP)
• http://www.metamend.com/what-is-cloaking.html (Target of ’search result’ – Irony?)

This is one of many examples. All were from the same Class A IP block. Have a look for yourself ARIN – 65.55.165.13. So if you caught the Owner there everything would quickly ad up. So then the question becomes “Why is MSN hammering my site with bogus search referrals which are completely skewing my metrics tools and tracking systems. As you can see from the screen above, we are still receiving traffic at time of writing.

Once I found the SERP string I started searching for other victims online and came across several informative posts including this rather enjoyable Post with an equally thoughtful title.

Early this month (I did mention how late I am getting to this right?) MSN posted on it’s brand new Live Search Webmaster Center Blog about this whole topic. They’ve done a pretty lousy job of responding to this epidemic of bad traffic, but hopefully it will result in some warfare in the SE marketshare. Anyhow all paths on this topic, up until the MSN post, ended at this discussion at Webmaster World. They’ve stated that these issues should be disappearing however we’re still seeing the traffic 2 weeks after their announcement so we’ll see how that goes.

Later.

Live Search obviously has a mountain to climb. Their index has been the brunt of criticism for far a good long time now. So much so that was witness a presenter as SES San Jose in ‘06 refer to their search index irrelevant and ‘who cares’ -ouch. Still, top positioning doesn’t mean that you’ll generate a ton of leads as there just aren’t enough MSN searchers at the moment. Even though IE ships with Live as the ‘default search privider’ it’s clear that it’s time for MSN Search to put up or… well. buy Yahoo! (I love that rumour) Hopefully this new buzz will encourage a few of us to wander back to the MSN for a while in hopes that a meaningful algorithm update is also in the works.