One step forward, 2 steps back. That should be their motto when it comes to the world of search engine marketing. After all this time, the corporate prisoners of the Redmond Compound, aka the Search Team, have taken a step in connecting with the webmaster community. You know, the community that doesn’t care about MSN or Live.com or adCenter. Yea, those webmasters…
There are 2 things in particular that ruffle my feathers about their new and improved Webmaster Center, and the typical “we won’t follow standards” BS we all know them for.
Not Following Standards… again..
I decided I would jump in there today and check things out, maybe add some clients sites, and maybe even my own. Like I have ever gotten any meaningful traffic from MSN anyways but I needed something to do while I was scratching my ass. I added my site, and the first MS calling card presented itself;
msn sucks again
So here I am having to add a “special” xml file in order to be indexed. So what about my ACTUAL xml sitemap file that you asshats are supposed to be using like your competitors? Yea, the guys that are kicking your ass to the curb daily on market share.
Ok, I guess that ain’t SOOO bad.. but when you’re this late in the game and lagging this far behind in the search area, you better make something that is brain-dead easy and quick. Just my 2 cents on that…
They Still Only Care About Your Money
The second thing that wins Corporate Shill award would be this little bait and switch crap they’re pulling here;
keyword research tool
Underlined in red is a link to a keyword research tool. Something that any serious webmaster, and any online marketer would take immediate interest in. Heck, Google and Yahoo are not even offering a direct link to any kind of keyword research tool from their webmaster services. Maybe, JUST MAYBE, the Redmond gang might be on to something here.. but wait…
total bullshit
WTF IS THIS? In order to do keyword research, I either have to own a copy of MS Office 2007, or download a trial version thats good for 60 days!? And the tool itself is some 64mb sized beast of a macro that requires FIVE video tutorials to understand?!? Well no wonder you guys can’t get market share; you got us webmasters jumping through freakin hoops just to get somewhere on a search engine that can’t even produce any meaningful conversions for us.
Conclusion
They could have had something here. They really, really could have had something here. Put keyword research tools into a webmaster portal for your search engine, and you will have made many friends. Even if your search engine totally sucks, at least giving us tools to help our clients succeed on it would help your negative image in this community. You know, the same community you just let down. Again.
