In record time for Microsoft, they fixed the referral bug in MSN Live, now the referrals are popping up in my web logs. Now I can finally rest easy. My wife will be happy not to hear me mumble about “lost referers” in my sleep. Ah, I give the developers a hard time over at Microsoft, but they have always been accomodating to me and the new MSN Live is looking sweet. It took a year and a half, but it looks like they finally got it!

But I still hold a grudge against Gates for ripping off our button bar idea back in the WordPerfect days, but you gotta respect him for launching it first.

Since the 14th MSN has been cruising along with an expired certificate. Nice. So, when prospects clicked through, they received the security warning. Seems that it only effected those who use their conversion tracking script … which I am a part of. Gotta track that traffic…

Do you think if I sent Bill my logs and show my lost sales during the 4-5 days it was down he would reimburse me? Yeah, me neither.

I’ve been asked to beta test the new “MSN AdSense” called “Content Ads” but I am passing at this time due to heavy workload and honestly, when it releases is when the real beta testing will start. Microsoft’s reputation for releasing software that isn’t ready for Prime Time (i.e. MSN AdCenter) is legendary.

Look for this to realease sometime in the early winter months as Microsoft is slating for a Fall release.

MSN used to only show the top 250 results of any search query. Now, they match Google by displaying the top 1,000 results.

MSN Dude had this to say regarding the latest “update” and “spammy looking pages being removed” from the index.

No one is talking about a “total ban” here — just some recent changes that tend to demote (but not remove) “spammy-looking” pages. If your site has disappeared completely, it’s not because of any recent update of ours. There is a blacklist, of course, but that process hasn’t changed lately. If you think your site has been blacklisted, send e-mail to webspam@microsoft.com. Be sure to do a “url:” query first though — just to make sure your page really is gone.

From the testing that we can see, there hasn’t been a ban of all “spammy looking pages” so this tends to be more of a manual removal than an filter being in place. If your site has been hit, do the URL query to ensure that the page is gone. Example: url:domain.com/page.html. It works whether or not you put in the “www” or “http”.

MSN Dumps LookSmart
As I reported last week, LookSmart changed their pricing structure to boost their revenues due to MSN’s new search “looming” on the horizon. The horizon just became reality for LookSmart. MSN has announced that they are dumping LookSmart.

What You Should Do Right Now
MSN has been testing their new search portal over the last few months during off-peak hours. While the exact criteria is not known to anyone outside of Microsoft, it is clear there are some basic techniques your website should employ to prepare for the switch:

1. Ensure your main pages are submitted to Inktomi’s paid inclusion program. MSN’s agreement with Inktomi runs through 2005, and even though Inktomi is owned by rival Yahoo!, MSN understands Inktomi’s importance is serving reliable results.
2. Since MSN has stated they are going after Google’s share of the market, MSN must create an equally effective criteria to serve up correct results as fast as Google does. This means that MSN should create something similar to Google’s PageRank, but Microsoft will learn from Google’s mistake and not make their system public knowledge.
3. Link Popularity will definitely be an issue – so if your main criteria is not to accept links from sites with a PageRank of less than 4/10, you may want to rethink your strategy now, as every link to your site should be factored into the new MSN equation.
4. As LookSmart has been dumped by MSN, Zeal will be dumped as well. Move your focus away from getting your sites listed in Zeal and focus on getting listed in the top directories in your industry – even the smaller ones.
5. Make sure your site has a clear Robots.txt file, a Site Map, and can be easily crawled by search engine spiders.