Cannot Get Listed in MSN

Three Year Old Site, fine in Google etc

[foolsgold]

So why no joy in MSN? We have tried a variety of things but no luckgetting listed. The site is clean and ranks well in google. Top ten for very competitive keywords!

[engine]

Just checking, it gets spidered?

[foolsgold]

Was doing, assume so but a good point will recheck.

But if not why and what to do?

[engine]

First hurdle first, methinks :)

Second hurdle - check your robots.txt isn't blocking their bot - easily done in error.

HTH

[BillyS]

Right now I'm getting something like 0.8% of my traffic from MSN. There is some kind of penalty applied, they are unwilling to work with me to fix it(although I'm sure the problem is on their end). Such is live.

Have you looked closely at their results? I wouldn't be surprised if they give up on search or buy someone that knows how to do it. If I were leading the charge I'd think about buying Ask.com.

[steveb]

Does the site have a 301 redirect for www?

(If so, MSN screws that up sometimes and removes whole domains.)

[foolsgold]

There is no 301 from non www to www. Just a direct link.

[RichTC]

steve

Ref: 301

Thats interesting and may account for some sites i know that dont feature. What would you do in that circumstance? im certainly reluctant to advise the 301 is removed, do you know an alternative method that has helped?

Thanks in advance

Rich

[steveb]

No. I'd advise people to send MSN emails telling them to fix their inept search engine.

As long as google is more important than MSN, I'd leave the 301 on any domain, which means some domains will get zero MSN traffic.

[dcheney]

I just checked my stats, and M$ is still only about 5% of SE referals. Frankly I wouldn't worry about it - the quality of the results within my niche are so bad I amazed I get any traffic from them.

[foolsgold]

Traffic from MSN is low, really low but sometimes clients stress about having 'Branding' as well as ranking across all three of the big guns. It's really frustrating not having the site even indexed so site name is listed but we have done all we can at our end without comprimising the Google and Yahoo! good rankings.

[rampzoid]

ms live search is useless - i've seen sites with home pages full of gif animations & almost zero text content get to no1 position(s).

even sites 'under construction' get ranked highly - obviously their algo is still up the left!

[gehrlekrona]

A while back almost all my sites got deindexed by MSN/Live and it was something about "link spamming" and I still can't figure out what that is. Maybe internal links with different anchor texts pointing to the same page?
I had some contact with MSNDude here on this forum and he said that one of my sites that were banned seemed OK so they would let it back in, which they did after 2-3 months. I find it interesting that they banned all sites with out checking them first so I am wondering if it was (is) an IP ban, owner ban or anything else since it was ALL sites and not just one or two.
Now I have some new sites that I have been working on and they got indexed in all other SE's very soon but MSN/Live doesn't seem interested at all!
My guess is that they, back in December, put in some filter that has somethig to do with internal linking and anchor texts. If you reach a breaking point there your sites will be banned and when you have a new site you want to get in it being dragged through that filter first and again, if MSN/Live don't like it you will not get indexed, no matter what you do.
Since we don't know the threashold it's kind'a tough to change anything so all we can hope for is that they either buy ask.com, yahoo, categorysearches.com or any other search engine and skip their own because the one they have got now is just rediculous! Even my wifes site about her dogs will not get indexed, and that is probably because she has it on the same IP as I do OR that I am the owner of the domain name.

[RichTC]

Looks like they have given up with it

A very poor search experience, still loads of sites missing from its index, still cant fully index a site, they have filtered all the good sites out and left all the junk behind.

They dont give a fig about webmasters, done nothing to sort out the inurl facility etc, etc.

Its been like this ages now and it doesnt look like its going to change.

I recall these problems being outlined to msn dude some two years ago and i cant see any improvements so perhaps they have just given up on it.

Do they still have a team working on improving the search facility or have they moved onto other msn projects?

[gehrlekrona]

I think they have given up on it. There doesn't seem to be any improvements at all, and the problems that was discovered/sent 2 YEARS ago to MSNDude is still there.
MSN/Live.com should just give it up or buy some other search engine that has their act together.
How hard can it be to create a search engine? What worked in the past doesn't seem to work now so some new innovative thing needs to be implemented and I am not sure M$ can come with anything innovative anymore. Look at all SE's popping up all around the Internet. They have features MSN only can dream of and doesn't have a lot of spam. Maybe Apple (MAC) should create their own SE? They might come up with some new features, good looking website?
MSN/Live.com is nothing we can count on anymore, that is if you have a great website. Google is not really much better. They keep changing the rules all the time and we are nithing more that test rabbits for them. They have a few sites that they call authority sites, that they leave alone. All other sites they can care less about. It's like a friggin traffic cop that doesn't know where the streets and stores are anymore. Imagine all cars having a "destination sticker" in their window. The cop is looking at it and send you in another direction than yesterday. You get confused since the street doesn't look the same from day to day, minute to minute. This is what Google is like. I am REALLY GLAD they are not Air Traffic Controllers. You'd end up in South America any time, even though you wanted to go to Alaska.....

[foolsgold]

Engine

It turns out the site in question does not get spidered?

So now what? No robots txt issues bye the way!

[loudspeaker]

I've just discovered that I have a similar problem - my (very old) site completely disappeared from MSN/Live. The funny thing is, if you type in the name of the site, it shows tons of pages MENTIONING my site, but I am not there at all... The number of clicks is down to 0. I think it happened a few months ago.

Spider still visits the site regularly, though.

Can't think of anything I did wrong, especially since I haven't really changed much in years and it was always fine.

Does anybody have any idea how to contact them for reinclusion?

[gehrlekrona]

What can I say, MSN/Live.com is a thing of the past!
I have a new site, totally white hat about restaurants. It's been online a month or so and I am getting hits from Google after a week or so. MSN? It's like dead! Won't even spider the site, and of course, if they don't spider the site, no pages are going to show up.
I can't figure out what's wrong with MSN (but I guess they can't either!). There should be no reason why they can't add a site to their index. I guess they must have some filter that removes old sites and won't spider/add new sites.
Could it be so simple that the number of links out can't be bigger than links in? No links in from a site not on the same IP/name server/owner..... no spidering and no addition to their index?

[AussieWebmaster]

Google still does that welcome to the neighborhood lift for new sites but they generally drop after a few weeks... msn has been sensitive to some link plays but has not seemed to penalize for paid links... interesting

[LostOne]

I rarely pay attention to MSN anymore. This thread sparked my interest to see what they are showing in my industry for some major keyphrases on page 1. No legitimate .orgs(Google- 2) Low number of major manufacturers(Google- 4-5). Suprisingly they do list three mom and pop retail operations. Who says the search engines don't favor them? msn does.

[ichthyous]

As long as google is more important than MSN, I'd leave the 301 on any domain, which means some domains will get zero MSN traffic.

Ahhh, so that's what's going on! I have a redirect in place from www to non-www and for some reason I just can't seem to get my site indexed by MSN anymmore. MSN Live brings in 0.2% of traffic now. Google and Yahoo are both fine. I guess then that there's no point to writing MSN anymore asking them to remove the penalty I though they had on my site

[phantombookman]

Personally I wouldn't worry too much. My sites rank very well in MSN but they send less than 1% of my search traffic.
As with Yahoo, I am beginning to wonder whether they are worth the bandwidth they consume!

[optimierung]

High noon - Dead or aLIVE

Having suffered as many others during many months with the same problems (but not a single one with G and Y) as written in this and other threads, also mailed to MSN I have started the last effort to get indexed by msnbot:

Uploaded the web to a new domain, excluded all other bots, removed 301s, ... and other recommendations!
I will wait for 1 month and give notice!

P.S. A friend at Gates Company told me 2 years ago MSN will never succeed!