Robert Scoble is visiting the plex tomorrow (okay, today at this point. I lost this post and need to get the WordPress autosave functionality going). What should I ask Robert?
Aha, looks like he’s got a question for me about the Windows Live Writer blog. Without doing any actual debugging (I’m not on the VPN), I noticed:
– a query for [windowslivewriter] returns pages from the site, so we do have some pages from the site in our index.
– but the site is pretty brand-new (only one post on the blog so far, dated Aug. 11, but it didn’t get traction on Techmeme until Aug. 14th).
– the title of the blog is “Writer Zone,” which is a little generic. If you want to show up for a query like [windows live writer], having that in the page title certainly could help.
– doing the query [site:windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com] returns some urls like windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry . In general, urls like that sometimes look like session IDs to search engines. Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.
Ah, but I can hear people saying that spaces.msn.com also had urls like “ericlam.spaces.msn.com/blog/cns!5D73BE0B4076E647!330.entry” and spaces.msn.com has lots of indexed urls. That brings up the whole subject that spaces.msn.com has been migrating to spaces.live.com. I know that was a pretty big change for the Spaces folks. Anytime we know about big changes like that across the web, we want to help make sure that the changes go smoothly. I know I got over 12 emails from GregP over at Microsoft about the progress of the migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com, and I checked with the indexing folks at Google to ask about how long it might take to crawl sites over at spaces.msn.com and see that they’d moved over to spaces.live.com. So there’s a chance that it might be something related to the hostload or the amount of new pages we can crawl over at spaces.live.com. Anyway, I’ll dig into it more tomorrow.
Let me know if there’s anything that you want me to ask Scoble. 🙂
Update: It was nice talking to Robert Scoble and Scott Mace of Calendar Swamp. We talked about blogging, the differences in cultures at several companies, and what Google should be doing better on. Scoble had a couple follow-on posts here and here.
By the way, it looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.
For a search like [windows live writer], I see the Windows Live Writer blog at number one, and the Windows Live Writer Beta product download page at number 2. Going forward, I’ll keep an eye on the spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com migration with the crawl folks to make sure that it continues to be smooth. It also looks like Mike Torres is #1 for searches like [torres talking], so overall things look pretty good now.