Page hijacking

Beta can't handle simple redirects

[geekay]

An amateur webmaster of a hobby site has succeeded in unintentionally eliminating a small site of mine from the new MSN Search by simply linking to me through a redirection page. In MSN its URL now (22 January) holds the contents of my site's page. There is no cloaking, 302 redirects or JS, just an ordinary html page, for click counting purposes, with a time "0" Meta Refresh to my page.

He was genuinly surprised to learn about those consequencies for me and immediately removed the redirect when I contacted him. But my site is now probably penalised by MSN Search for "duplicate content". Thus the next step, after MSN has stopped indexing that now removed redirection page, would be that we both are eliminated from MSN.

The keyword for another, more important site of mine is "Widgetfacts", also the company's name. It is a generic word in a European language. My site is #1 of 500+ for this keyword in Google and Yahoo, but not found in MSN Beta (under that very keyword, that is). Instead MSN lists at least one hundred near-identical directories, that all happen to contain the word "widgetfacts", and in exactly the same sentence (but not related to me).

[zeus]

OH NO, not MSN also I thought it was only Google that had such problems

[walrus]

<Instead MSN lists at least one hundred near-identical directories, that all happen to contain the word "widgetfacts", and in exactly the same sentence (but not related to me).>

I've seen some pretty dismal results from the new msn search too. I'm hoping its just part of the phasing in and will get better over the next few weeks because this new one gives worse results than the old one.

[crobb305]

I think they are going live prematurely. They should NOT get in a hurry. Otherwise, they will launch a crappy set of serps full of redirects and hijacks like Google has become.