SERP Count MSN vs Yahoo vs Google

[nakulgoyal]

I have an ecommerce website that has close to half a million pages. The site is around 2.5 years old, homepage pagerank 6. I am trying to get it completely indexed in all the 3 search engines.

As of today, the Serp count shows 100k pages indexed in Google, 125k in Yahoo and around 3k in MSN.

Can anybody guide me what the reasons are for the massive variances and what is the best way to get a deep crawl, except what everybody says "Buy a high PR link". Even if I do that, would it help for all 3 search engines?

[Marcia]

This won't answer your question, but you should know that there's a bug in MSN Search that messes up with incorrect page counts.

For just one example, one site of mine, when you do a site:example.com search, appears to have 146 pages by their count, same when you go to the second page of search results. Then when you go to the third page, it shows them having 27 pages. That isn't the whole site (it's actually closer to 50 pages) but that's what they seem to have.

[nakulgoyal]

I agree. I actually thought of the same for Yahoo, until when Yahoo announced a bigger index size then yahoo and then things began to shake at yahoo and msn. I am actually surprised to see a bigger number at yahoo then google. But MSN, is strange. The day my number changes, I get traffic spikes, and that is the reason, I am trying to figure this out.

[surftrack]

i find that msn actually reports less than is actually indexed.

i have quite a few large db oriented sites that show up in deep backlinks on other sites but do not show up as number of indexed pages search.

I personally think that msn is just doing that to save on result queries.

[Erku]

nakulgoyal

I am in the exact position. Google and Yahoo are doing just great, MSN is extremely weak.

Is it the small size of their index? Or is it us?

MSN's performance for my site is extremely weak in comparison of yahoo and google.

Is there an MSN rep in this forum to address these questions and ask for general recommendations?

Thanks

[engine]

It's one of the issues I raised with MSN. Needless to say, there are big differences between the systems, and both G and Y have a head start, but MSN are working very hard to improve. It's a huge undertaking and I'm impressed how far they've come since their first showing last year. I'm sure we'll see more improvements coming in the next few months.

Initially, however, I'd be more concerened about the performance of the urls in the serps at the moment.
Are they performing for you?

[BillyS]

I wonder if this is a "large site" problem. MSN shows nearly all my pages (around 1,100) and they really are in the index (I've tested).

[nakulgoyal]

BillyS, I think you are right. It's a probably a large site thing. Engine, did they recommend anything to make sure there is nothing we are doing wrong?