This would be amusing enough on its ownIts been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while Im sure Googles automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, its strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Googles, but its no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.

But it gets even better: Bings Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Googles, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.

This might seem like a trivial goof on Googles part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browsers integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for bing on Google every day.

Read more: Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While

Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didnt love me enough)Im a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website arent as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

Thats not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Quoting official Google statement, Media Decoder reports:

Were always experimenting with ways to make Google News more useful, occasionally, this means we have to re-evaluate our efforts to be sure we focus on features that make the most sense for our users.

What could have gone wrong with this feature? If Google wanted to elicit comments, it should have elicited comments from the users instead of the personalities featured in the news. If you were featured in a news items that runs on Google News, would you even bother commenting on the news item on the site itself?

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As to the search results itself, these are now indented but the most significant change was the removal of the page size indicator. This indicator gives you an idea of how long it will take for the page to load. Google also removed the word pages from the previous similar pages link.

Was there any improvement in the loading speed? We have no way of telling now. But ii could be faster or slower. Perhaps if youre a keen observer whenever you use Google search, maybe you can easily tell whether there was any change in the speed of loading the search results or none at all.

So, any idea on why Google did these changes? Is it for aesthetic purposes? Revenue generation or what? Do you like the new look of Google search results page? Personally, I prefer the old one or maybe perhaps I could learn to like this new look once I get used to it.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

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