URL only. and doesn't update

Can MSN handle 301 redirects?

[photopassjapan]

Hi.

And sorry if this has been discussed before :P

I noticed that some of our pages ( yeah... "some"... well apparently the most important ones ) show up as URL only, with a cached version of a "moved permanently" system response. Uh...

Which is the case actually... but G and Y kind of handled the situation ... soo... it's ONLY a case in MSN, and only if the redirect from example.com to www.example.com and the redirects from /default.html to / can't be handled by this bot.

Or is it just us who it's picking on? :)
I guess not...

Is there any way to work around this or will it solve itself?

[jdMorgan]

> with a cached version of a "moved permanently" system response.

That indicates that the 301 redirect was improperly implemented, since otherwise, "moved permanently" would never appear in the cache. Check those URLs using the "Live HTTP Headers" extension to FireFox, and compare the results to a correct redirect response, such as what you'll get if you test http://yahoo.com (redirects to http://www.yahoo.com).

Jim

[steveb]

This has been happening for months. Standard 301's sometimes show the moved permanently cache.

This normally kills the ranking for the new/correct page. It's a longstanding MSN screwup that they don't seem to have made any progress on.

[followgreg]

Hey you should be happy they kept other pages. For some others, including our sites, ONLY the 301 screwed up Url's were kept in the index.
No sure what to call it, an overscrewup? Anyways as mentioned by steveb they seem to have absolutely no desire to fix this or anything else.
It's their call, after all THEY invested THEIR money into this MSN search.
Some stupid things, that have to do with the basics of indexing websites are not working well (or not working at all) with MSN search. I'd say that instead of catching up with GG, their are falling behind....reaaaaalllyyy far behind, unfortunately.

[ichthyous]

I have seen this with my 301's pages as well. Google and Yahoo handle them fine, but MSN just kills them and they show up as url only. It doesn't seem to be able to find the new pages

[sem4u]

I have the same problem with this. Yahoo & Google have both followed the 301 redirect from one domain to the other, but on MSN a link:www.domain.com search for the original domain brings back URL only listings and an

"Object Moved
This document may be found here"

message in the cache.

The site command for the new domain shows nothing. The redirect and new site went live 20th December and the cache date of the old pages is 1st January 2007. Any ideas? Should I just wait it out?

[LunaC]

I've seen this on a few of my sites to, oddly the one that I recently began moving pages inside isn't.. the redirects are fine for the ones moved 3 months ago, smooth transition within around 2 weeks. The ones I did a few weeks ago, some have not been updated the rest have been completely removed. No "Moved permanently" cached response page, no page at all.

I have no idea why some are working when others don't though. All had been thoroughly checked with LiveHTTPheaders extension. The moved content is almost totally the same as the original, any that changed significantly I just let 404.

I've could have sworn I saw this before with site:www.msn.com but now I'm just finding a lot of 302's to 404s, indexed 404's and a some mistyped links indexed... hmm... doesn't give me a lot of faith in msn's abilities. Worth looking at though if you want to feel better about how it indexes your own sites ;)

Edit:
Nevermind, those pages that are missing have the same cached "Moved Permanently. The document has moved here." if I search by old address, gone in the regular search listings for their terms. No results found for new url.

These pages were moved December 18 (later than I thought), so it might be too early to tell what's happening, but something looks very wrong.

Tested again just now, headers are showing a clean 301 and have moved nicely to their new url in Yahoo and Google. No drop in rankings there, up a few notches for some terms.

The pages that moved successfully in MSN were 301'd September 4, 2006. I can't find my notes about when they updated for msn.

[edited by: LunaC at 3:53 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2007]

[sem4u]

The home page of the new URL has now been indexed by MSN with a cache date of 10th January. The old domain is still listed as URL only. It is a start.

[sem4u]

Just a quick update. MSN has now indexed 14 pages out of 600+.

In comparison Yahoo has indexed 44 and Google has 316 (all except the home page are supplemental).