MSN Search losing sites when host is changed

[Marcia]

MSN has "lost" some sites that I recently moved to another host, some partially and some almost completely, one altogether which is gradually coming back slowly, one page at a time. Not all that I moved were affected but I need to move some more and I'm afraid to now.

One site was out altogether and finally has 3 pages indexed (there were about 50-60) with no sign of more in a couple of weeks, after I did a resubmission with the form at MSN Search and linked from a blog to see if that would work. At least the index and 2 others are now back. With another it was all gone but the homepage with not all back yet and for another two the index pages are still missing. With one that's now on a dedicated IP, I put a redirect in .htaccess from the IP number to the www.example.com and just submitted by IP number.

Looking at the cache for one that's now a URL only index page, and what's turning up few a of the other moved sites, it appears that even though the namerservers were changed many, many days ago (two weeks + I think), it's still showing what was in the older cache a while back for the pages that are still indexed.

I'm no techie, but it appears to me that there's a lag time in updating DNS for sites, which used to create havoc with Google a few years back (there were a number of threads about it in the Google forum) - especially troublesome when sites were moved between shared IPs.

[edited by: Marcia at 12:30 am (utc) on Aug. 7, 2006]

[jdMorgan]

When you moved these sites, did you leave the site up on the old server as well as putting it on the new server? In other words, if MSBbot used 'old' DNS IP address information, what did it 'see' on the old server?

Jim