Forum Moderators: mack
At the expense of repeating myself, I'm going to repeat myself. :-) Here are the guidelines I'm trying to follow when I post here:
I won't discuss the problems of particular sites in any public forum. As long as I can handle the volume, I'm happy to get "sticky" messages, though.
I also won't discuss competitors here -- they have their own forums, and I figure they already have enough people talking about them. :-)
I will not preannounce anything specific here; I might say "we're working extra hard over the summer to fight Spam," but I'm not going to post something like "look for a giant spam-killer release on April first!" After a release goes out and someone notices it, THEN I'll comment on it. If no one notices it, it probably wasn't worth talking about anyway.
Finally, I'm not going to reveal any secret Intellectual Property that would help someone build their own search engine or hack ours. Most of it's hard to explain anyway. :-)
[edited by: engine at 1:54 pm (utc) on June 5, 2006]
seriously,
There is always time for work later...
The arabia results are nothing like before the update, except maybe by coincidence sometimes.
Even worse, I noticed the first URLs listed for a site:example.com search returned a bunch of listings for pages that have been redirected for somewhere between nine months and eighteen months. Shockingly these show a "cache", but cache is:
Moved Permanently
The document has moved here.
In other words, they are somehow indexing the inaccessible inner server response crap as a "page".
Based on just this one example, it would seem likely that a reason that MSN is "losing" index pages is because instead of indexing the actual page, they are very stupidly indexing the server response somehow when a page has a 301 on it (from non-www to www, or other reasons).
In the MSN and a9 search, 4 out of the 10 top results are from subdomains one company who spams the engines, 3 are different URLs of the same company, 1 is a domain name landing page.
In the old results (http://search.arabia.msn.com/), every URl in the top 10 for this particular search is a seperate and distinct URL, and all seem to have been around awhile, and are known authorities in the area. Not so with the new update.
When you get to competitve terms, this update yields HORRIBLE results. Please roll back to the SERPs from [search.arabia.msn.com...] - those were the type of results that made me swith to Windows Live from Google, but now I can't seem find anything! Bring back the authority sites and stop rewarding domain name spam, PLEASE!
Since the new alogorithm I can't get anything new indexed or the speed at which msn indexes has been really slow lately.
The SERPs are quite different from those currently being shown on msn.com; can anyone else confirm whether they are -- or are not -- roughly the same as the old msn.com results (before this recent algo update)?
From what I see and remember I can confirm that the arabia.search.msn.com results are roughly the same as before the recent update and much better than the results on search.msn.com
I originally thought the arabia results looked like an old/pre-update dataset. But then I noticed some websites ranked well that I have not seen ranking in months. Could be a test of some sort?
For me it's exactly the opposite!
Based on just this one example, it would seem likely that a reason that MSN is "losing" index pages is because instead of indexing the actual page, they are very stupidly indexing the server response somehow when a page has a 301 on it (from non-www to www, or other reasons).
That makes sense on my end Steve .. Index is gone for me ... 301 www to NON www and even though I see my other pages nothings ranking .
They were selective in going after the high traffic high revenue sectors air , hotels , mutual funds , stocks etc....
What about the missing Index pages ..what does that signify ..
A.that they think you are spamming
B. that they simply screwed up on handling 301 redirects
Everyone that had there index pulled should post so we can see if we can find a common issue
I'll also ask again..anyone know if this update is over?
This includes searches that I've been #1 for since MSN started, including domain name and stuff like that.
Before this last update, it was very disheartening to see so much subdomain spam, adsense scraper sites, redirect doorways and other garbage sites etc.. ahead of us.
Keep up the good work MSN!
I'm aware that this is yet another 'sample of one,' but it caught my eye because, of all the sites I have anything to do with, this one is likely the cleanest, oldest, most authoritative, and theoretically most proof against any kind of penalty/filters. Also, several of my less-deserving sites have remained virtually unscathed, so when this update buried my 'best' site, it was a real eye-opener.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that the site stayed well-placed in the previously-discussed arabia.search.msn.com results. And again, I mean ranking for the single most-definitive keyword.
The page in question now has a cached page date of 05-June, so it was re-crawled shortly before recovery.
So from here, it looks like the 'authority' weighting has been dialed back up. Anyone else?
Jim
Secondly, the site which are now showing up on first page for my keywords were down in the dump before this so-called "update" and the site which are 1st and 2nd of the first page even on google and yahoo are being seen at 3rd and 4th pages. What is interesting to see is that all the sites which are on first 5 pages are all sub-pages of the site and none of them are index page (i.e. "www.example.com/widget.htm").
I, too, have noticed a huge change in the quality of results for multiple terms we track. Some termd completely unrelated to other terms, so it's not just one area I've looked at.
Right now, on one of our major terms, a PR8 blog page with 1 page talking about the term is sitting happily at #2, while quality site with MANY pages related to the term are completely gone. Duplicates of the same site are listed twice on some pages with example.com/something.html and example.com/somethingelse.html a couple results below it.
There are 3 blog pages listed on the first page for the above term and the first page really consists of sites most people would laugh at.
On other terms, well know, high content sites have been replaced with tiny spamish (recycled article content) sites that are a joke, or blog sites that just happen to mention the word in their daily rantings.
My site is completely gone of the results for our major terms, which is a bit upsetting considering I have done my darnedest to make sure it was original and worth visiting, building my site around what would help my visitors... unique content and such.
I realize msn is going through growing pains, so I am trying to wait it out, but after staring at the results daily hoping that "today will be the day" it is better, I am feeling a bit down.
Truthfully I did feel the other results were better, and I wasn't listed in the top 5 or anything, but at least it had sites that showed nice content for what you were looking for.
Just my 1 cent opinion.
The MSN should be renamed MNS as in
Make No Sense ....results.
