Forum Moderators: mack
Results look very good so far, Look out Google!
AND THERE WAS THREE
The Dr
Well now that they are clearly integrating the BETA into live results, does anyone have any idea of the refresh frequency?
Until January 1st, we ranked #8 for an 800,000+ search volume (Overture stats) term and #1 for a wide range of other terms. On January 1st we rolled out a new layout but forgot to include our robots.txt file. By January 3rd, our entire site dropped from the index.
It was January 14th before we realized what was wrong and added the robots.txt file back to the site. January 15th, we were #13 for the 800k term, January 17th - #9, January 18th - #6, January 19th - #3. All of the other terms were back to their #1 spots by the 16th. All of these pages were .aspx files vs the old .asp files we had prior to January 1st.
(all of the above refers to the beta results)
Judging from this one case, I’d say they move VERY quickly ESPECIALLY compared to Google.
I see 2-3 days refresh rate
Sorry if this has been covered earlier - haven't time to read all of such a long thread
. . . and just checked again - it's back! Obviously seeing a spike in traffic from WebmasterWorld members testing :)
In 2 years, Yahoo, Google, Teoma (Ask), and Mama never excluded a site if it did not have a robots.txt file. The assumption seemed to be no robots.txt indicated permission to crawl everything. As I have posted on here many times, several pages of our site have been the #1 results for 2 years on all those SEs on 2 -4 keyword searches, with no robots.txt file. Not a single one of our pages shows up anywhere in MSN beta. So, it sounds like you MAY be describing our problem.
I just added a robots.txt to our root to see if THAT might be MSN beta's problem with listing our site. The file contains some comments and:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
If someone reading this is not familiar with robots.txt syntax, there are examples and a robots.txt file checker here:
Make sure you use an editor that breaks lines Unix style (line feed w/o carriage return). The Notepad editor, like most Windows platform tools, adds a carriage return with the line feed which won't work.
I'm seeing that too, but that was a tweak they put in a few weeks ago, before that the keywords I was following was landing on the correct, key word subject page. Now it's landing on the secondary page. I'd expect to see more tweaks like that in the coming months, so I'm not going to get too fond of any set of serps I get.
(adding robots.txt files to all domains now. lol)
Sounds like MSN Beta's running a tight refresh. Nice.
