Poor Indexing and Results in MSN (LIVE)

[byronshell]

Having a major MSN Search issue. Client danforthdiamond(dot)com is ranking very well in Google with almost 4000 indexed pages. MSN shows only 25 pages and two home urls, one with a "?" as part of the url.

This has been the same for over a month. Any ideas? I'm wondering if the mod_rewrite they did a few months ago is causing the issue, especially when a "?" after the url is being cached as a the home page. I need a mod_rewrite specialist to help out possibly.

[Paz]

Hi,

have a look at this post, maybe it's relevant.

http://www.boogybonbon.com/2006/11/04/how-to-remove-your-competitors-from-msn-live/

Cheers,
Paz.

[Kate]

Thnx PaZ i read that the MSN needs to fix that loop hole in its algo.. its so strange a competitor can alter your rankings in MSN

[bermuda]

The points mentioned just show a small part of the effects since the live.com transition. That's the reason many pros were waiting for the dust to settle and detect the new features or flaws.

In the first days that the great move was in action, the speed of MSN in finding and grabbing new web pages was just as fast as a week before but it's a couple of days that Live has been showing strange results in many cases.

Many already indexed pages are dropped from the index or new web pages indexed but not shown through some IPs.

They probably are checking their whole system and listening to people's feedback.

[byronshell]

Thanks, Paz. We have implemented the code on site's home page. I also found a link pointing to the home page with an accidental "?" in the link which has been changed.

Update: the code couldn't be implemented with the mod rewrite. Now Live only shows 5 pages in the index while the other google and Yahoo show almost 4000. I'm stumped.

[waveshoppe]

MSN has potential but you must remember that they are relatively new to the SE arena. IMO their biggest handicap is that their algo does not seem to be able to identify authority sites.

[bermuda]

The real problem at present is that Yahoo and MSN are just searching for the answer that are they going to be known as major search engines or continue with their power in the web portals area.

[byronshell]

Just an update. My clients site has still not been indexed. We have begun hand submitting some core pages and they have stuck but no pages are coming up for any search results with MSN or Live search.

[Paz]

Yes it does look odd. You have too many similar page titles and descriptions, but normally MSN is more generous than Google or Yahoo with this.

MSN can be a bit quirky on coding though. I'd fix the way you load your CSS and make it

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dd.css" .....

I'd also lift the dd.css exclusion from your robots.txt and then ask for a manual review. With MSN you've a good chance of a human response; eventually.