Kumo: The New Name Of Microsoft Live Search?

Microsoft expected to rebrand Live.com to Kumo.com

According to various rumors and reports, Microsoft’s search engine, known as Live Search will be rebranded as Kumo, as early as next year.

Apparently, the new name was already transferred from registrar to Microsoft and now Kumo.com points to a Microsoft’s internal test site.

Earlier this year during the Search Marketing Expo conference, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, hinted about a possible change of the company’s “Live” brand.

In Johnson’s opinion having multiple identities for the same online services such as MSN Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger and MSN Messenger is confusing for the users.

In addition, Johnson explained that a brand “fix” is needed as Microsoft decided to drop its bid for Yahoo and improve its Live Search engine.

However, it remains to be seen if Kumo will be the new name of Mcirosoft’s search engine or if the compaby is trying to create just another service.

Kumo means in Japanese “cloud” and some reports are pointing out that maybe it could be related to Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative.

Launched in 2005, Live Search, Microsoft’s effort to catch up with the web giant Google, had replaced MSN Search in 2006. Despite the company’s efforts, Live Search acquired only 11 percent of the search market, far behind its main competitor, Google.

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SEO Advice from Microsoft Office Live

Here’s a slightly "Black Hat" SEO advice from Microsoft that you must avoid else there’s a risk that your site may get penalized in Google search results.

Google clearly states that link exchange schemes ("Link to me and I’ll link to you.") violate their webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. This includes reciprocal links as well as paid text links.

On the other hand, Microsoft, in their Office Live Small Business blog, openly suggests that website owners may participate in Link Exchange programs in order to "boost [site] rankings in search engines."

The article lists several options for building incoming links to your site including link swaps via email requests or outsourcing the process to an external link building firm.

Is this good SEO advice or bad? In fact, what you read on the the Office Live blog may risk your site’s position even in Microsoft’s own Live Search as their guidelines say – "Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index."

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