• Posted by Melanie
• 30 August 2011
• Ecommerce SEO, Giggles, Myths Misconceptions

Senior Product Manager Duane Forrester from Bing recently contributed in a Webmaster World forum discussion to say the following regarding the Meta Keyword tag.

I'll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won't rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.

How MSN typical is that?

The entire search community is trying to fix the spam while Bing seeks to perpetuate it further. This is NOT 1997 anymore. Even at "one of a thousand signals" it's a ridiculous statement and signal. So in this page I can say in a proper Meta Keyword Tag that the post is about red tomatoes ( have a look for yourselves =P ) and Bing will actually consider this stupidity which is hidden from normal users?  Really dumb guys!

This from the folks who took 4 years to realize that we use no WWW in our urls.... The forced redirect was literally ignored by Bing for 4 full years and whose own design staff has to use a ton of IE hacks to display their OWN damn pages. So Microsoft just handed all the motivation the spammers need to begin adding a thousand keywords stuffed in the head of their pages and cause us unsurpassed frustration trying to explain to clients that the Meta Keyword tag is NOT going to help them rank... Unbelievable!

• Posted by Melanie
• 21 June 2011
• Giggles, Small Business

This is apparently not new at all... But recently received an email from Google telling me to upgrade an old clients WordPress installation. This email, apparently intended to be a friendly reminder to help webmasters get off of their butts and upgrade their software makes me a bit curious. Does Google monitor software versions it can discover for the sake of additional malware probabilities requiring a manual review or more close watch? Search quality with regard to rank, maintenance and general is anybody home in there questions?

Seems to me that Google is not likely to be just sending a friendly reminder here... Most likely there is a master purpose (certainly for the greater good of mankind) and the reminder is a bonus service. So this benevolent service is in fact helpful to most, but clearly it means Google's watching.

For the record, this is an old, stubborn client that wouldn't upgrade their website unless sales completely stopped.... and then they might even use PPC to get by.

See the friendly email from Google Search Quality Team below... and yes, upon full email trace it is in fact from Google.

Website removed to protect the stubborn! Click to enlarge