The Coming Nightmare with Yahoo and Bing
December 7, 2009
There’s a little known secret regarding Bing and how it indexes sites, and this bug is going to be magnified the second Yahoo! adopts Bing results.
Bing doesn’t spider “&” in the url.
No literally, it doesn’t.. right now no one cares because Bing has a dismal market share. But with the adoption of Bing results in Yahoo! people are overnight going to wonder what happened to their search engine rankings in Yahoo.
In the traditional Microsoft Way, they are taking a non-standard approach to URL structures. In the W3.org a single & will pass validation, however Microsoft believes it does not, and will will not index anything that has an & in it unless it’s followed by a ” & amp ; ”
HUH?
Microsoft has stated:
For URLs that include ampersands (typically used between sets of dynamic attributes), substitute the equivalent escape code & amp ; for the single ampersand character (&) to enable the page to pass HTML validation checks (as in http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx?var=1& amp ;var=2)
Don’t believe us, read it directly on their official blog
My SEO Ad Agency Yooter InterActive has been bracing our clients for the oncoming problem for some time now, any respectable SEO firm by now most likely has contacted you and informed you of some of these problems by now.
The problem is deeper than the “&” issue, much deeper. This is just an example of what is to come.. a nightmare of non-standard rules to spidering the web.
Saying Microsoft and standards in the same sentance is an oxymoran.
For example, the worst browser in history is IE6 , not because of how fast it loads or how many times it crashes.. or the security holes in it that you can drive a Mack Truck though…. but rather because it can’t render a webpage for the life of it using standard web compliance. Even IE 8 requires you to run in compatibility mode “IE: Compliance mode” to render webpages right.
Microsoft’s stance is shameful on this, it’s going to wreck havoc for many website owners. A prime example is phpbb.com , a popular forum software package. Well right out of the box it runs the now “illegal” & in the syntax.
For example, this post here on Sqlspace will never be indexed in Bing, even if half the internet is pointing to it because it’s breaking news.
For the record, we built a page on Tribble that supposedly doesn’t pass validation according to Microsoft, well low and behold.. it DOES pass validation click on that to see for yourself.
Dear Microsoft, before you take the world on another IE6 tour, please consult with the webmasters and the people using the site, because trust me on this.. this new rule wouldn’t pass validation…
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