Forum Moderators: mack
I would have posted this in the Oct. 23 update thread - but this isn't the minor shuffle that occured a week or so ago - I'm seeing a whole new set of serps.
And although I was told we weren't under some kind of penalty, we are not even showing up in the top 300 for our unique name.
I also noticed that MSN is indexing pages that I've blocked with robots.txt such as my newsletter registration page - which has nothing but a short form on it. They've also got pages that I've changed using mod-rewrite to prevent duplicate content issues.
And it's been that way for nearly two years now. Quite sad.
For christmas: I am planning to just drop my hosting, designer and web developer - They are not worth it since a stupid copyright infrigement on Blogspot or the like will do the trick.
Yes 2 years after the launch of their beta (or was this a beta launch?), and after deploying their strider spam fighting bot they prove that they can't index homepages nor fight the most commonly used spammy techniques.
....Tired of it...I used to but I am not supporting this cr.p anymore. They can't make it, period.
Since Yahoo can't either...guess why 90% of the market belongs to Google by default.
Agree with what was said, no regards for title and absolute overkill on subdomain issues.
I did a test about one month ago with one domain I have and added one extra keyword pertaining to what I do on my index page. The page is generally spam free and has very little focus on rank.
My rank in MSN for that term dropped 4 spots.
Removing the keyword to the older version moved me up the same amount of spots.
When a search engine can move you up and down that quick based on the addition of one keyword to your page, then return to to that previous position, that spells volatility to me. When MSN has more of a grip on authority, sites will not 'move' so easily.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 11:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2006]
I feel exactly the same about this - its plain frustrating and such a waste of potential. Gawd knows we need an alternative to Google but im at a point now where i dont think they want to produce quality (they just talk about it).
This policy of "less is more" has just let the spammers run riot producing thin content junk sites and blog sites to spam all the commercial areas yet they dont see it.
This policy or lack of technology where they either cant or dont deep index a site means they dont have the data to produce half decent serps on longer string search terms
This inability to understand the value of links from authority sites to that of blog sites means they reward more of the junk whilst losing more of the quality.
In all this learning algo doesnt work - with every update since the start the serps have got worse imo. They have slowly got weaker and weaker with more and more quality filtered out with every update until we now have one big mess.
Only plus factor i can see is that msn cant get any worse now, its not possible. Its none relevent and not effective - its now at the bottom of the pile and if they cant see this or even acknowledge they have problems then we have no hope of improvement from them from here.
Its taken two years to get to this - you couldnt make it up!
[edited by: RichTC at 11:43 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2006]
MSN search has been worthless for any topic for too long. For instance recently I was researching a medical condition and MSN's first ten listings were different websites with the exact same content...word for word. Well known medical sites were deep in the serps dealing with the subject. It seemed strange that MSN allowed MFA (made for adsense) sites dominate top rankings for a subject that would attract a tremendous amount of traffic.
Results that I follow are dead on with authority.
Well, I guess that depends what results you follow.
Looking at some widget serps (on several common competitive searches), I see blogspot pages in five of the top 10 results. It's not necessarily comforting to me that a client's site shares the first page with these sites.
On another common and less competitive search, I see as #1 a relatively new one-page site that has 200 identical run of site inbounds as virtually its only inbound links. It has essentially no content... just an order form. There's a link-exchange link at the bottom of the page.
A while back there was a discussion in the MSN forum about how to recognize good quality and authority sites, since some of us felt that MSN wasn't delivering those. It's easier to describe how to recognize bad quality, non-authoritative sites.
MSN needs to take a look at where they're going, because they're going down the wrong path. I for one would like to see them build a good search engine, but it doesn't appear that they're doing that.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:48 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]
Can you sticky me a search where the serps have authority sites in the top 10. Im not doubting what you say it could be the niche you are in, only i just have not seen these miraculous results you post about.
Every search i do without exception contains in the top ten either blog spam, junk sites, non relevent results, spammy keyword-keyworddomain sites or a combination of all four.
The serps are at an all time low imo
Rich
[edited by: RichTC at 4:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]
Come on MSN, lets see a reeeeal update! Shake the SERP's up already, it's beginning to remind me of Yahoo! :-)
At the end of the day it may even help Yahoo getting back some of the market shares, and believe me when I say that Yahoo is really NOT a sophisticated engine at all (not to mentioned how dishonest they are when manipulating SERP's).
It is extremely frustrating, not only as webmaster, but for business owners to see that MSN just misses their homepage or just considers spam from blogspot more relevant than their site.
From where I stand I am particularly upset when homepages are gone missing, it's like they turned the spam bot on and they got it ALL wrong, keeping the spam and filtering regular sites.
Not to mention that earlier this year, MSN introduced their big ideas and solutions for fighting spam. They described it well though, now they do all the opposite.
MSN is currently junk, if they are working on it then work faster, no need of a Phd to understand that's just wrong.
When your name is Microsoft, the giant, with billions of dollars to back you up, there are NO excuses whatsoever.
No excuses for providing your users with such terrible SERP's.
I really believed that they could make it, the search market badly needs real competition, more "balance", but no apparently I was wrong.
I will not used Adcenter because to stick with MSN/Live you must be dumb and I don't need dumb visitors (their credit cards are probably already maxed out) nor I will buy Windows Vista, that my protest :) and by the way my wallet will be gratefull.
....
This will in turn affect revenues to them as webmasters continue to support google, Yahoo and the smaller search engines - maybe at that point someone at msn will wake up and smell the coffee.
When the likes of gigablast, ask jeeves and some of the small search engines can out perform msn in terms of search quality you would think someone at msn would be asking questions.
I think what i find the most frustrating is that they dont see or acknowledge they have a problem they just put out statements about how great they are, keep talking the talk and never delivering - the current algo is producing serps that are just plain awfull and it doesnt look like this is likely to change, well not in the short term anyway!
It seems to me that MSN just jumps around so you don't know how you will rank one month to the next.
The kw sector related to my industry seems to have improved relative to what it was...which was absolutely as bad as you could get before. I am not saying the quality of the top 20 or so listings are what google or yahoo serves up. However, there is improvement in that some the older, more original and authoritative sites have moved to the forefront.
I have done some random searches on MSN since noticing this thread and I agree with you that the serps for most searches are still junk...blogs, mfa, spam, etc. Whether searching for information or where to buy widgets...MSN is still pretty much useless. Even adcenter doesn't seem to be taking off very well...most of the sponsored listings are generic because the real widget merchants aren't buying yet.
occasionally getting no results occasionally getting site is down, and when i do get the first 10 results, can't go to anymore pages.
hmmm.
Get ready for a new dimension in search...November 7th
I clicked on the link but it still hasn't loaded. My computer and Opera seem to be having issues...
Get ready for a new dimension in search...November 7th
I was able to click through to the link, and it went to local.live with 3-D Mapping. Nothing that seems to have anything to do with improved search quality from what I can tell.
Something has to happen. The results can't get any worse, IMHO. I can't even use the search. All blogspot.
Man, things seemed so promising just a few months ago. I still have my fingers crossed.
When i click on the link the page doesn't even load.
I hope, but very much doubt that this has to do with improving current (terrible) SERP's as crobb305 said; depressing.
I would think this is a reference to 3D maps.
So that's where all the big bucks went instead of working on search algorithms? Then thank you guys, this really makes my day...
Please suggest why.......
They are still having good ranking in GOOGLE.
MSN crawler is also regularly visiting my site and shows up in site stats. The backlinks and site cached pages are also there.
This happened just 5 days back.
Any Help is appreciated.
Maybe someday they'll get it right.
I would have to say that the results appear to be improving incrementally...
It's interesting to see right now, on some of the searches I've been monitoring, that little by little some of the blogspot results are dropping away (down from 5 of them to 3 of them on the first page), and a few sites I'd expect to rank on the searches are moving up.
But run-of-site links still seem to suffice to propel a worthless page to the top... and there are many junk sites up there.
It completely depends, by the way, on the market area. In some areas, instead of the spam, you get governmental or academic reports from the 1990s... of general interest to no one... that chance to have your search terms in the title.
