Index page only penalty?

[textex]

Inner pages rank. Homepage is missing from SERPs. Homepage is indexed. Appears as though we have some sort of penalty on the homepage only. Anyone else seeing this?

[BillyS]

I've not seen this. I think it's unfortunate that Live.com gets this kind of attention from webmasters. The waning interest in this forum is very telling.

[textex]

I hear ya...but to not care about a channel of traffic would be silly...

[RichTC]

textex

Its not a case of webmasters ignoring a possible source of website traffic its more of a case of msn not taking a) an interest in improving search and b) showing no signs of supporting the webmaster community.

Be honest, the live serps are at best dire. They are next to useless. They have sites missing all over the index and junk ranking left right and centre.

In my office the default page for all staff computers is msn. Yet every staff member uses google to search despite the msn search box being at the top of the page. Thats because the staff know they wont get the answers they want and need to "google it" to get results!

We all want msn to improve and be a real contender against googles hold, we need a serious alternative, its good for search quality but msn are not it.

Currently, Its like msn have given up on search all together and thats why interest in this forum reflects that. If they improve search then maybe webmasters will start showing an interest and be more bothered about traffic from them

[Marcia]

Check on the www. non-www issue and also, whether they've got index.html (or equivalents) indexed. I had some serious issues where that's concerned, unfortunately the site ended up out of MSN altogether.

[geoseo]

Yes, Textex, we have the exact same problem and have for about 6 months. The homepage is indexed and cached but with the DMOZ lisitng, not showing for results that we would in Google(industry leader), now not even returning for a brand term search. ANY suggestions would be welcome.

[geoseo]

Also, our homepage is being crawled regularly by MSNbot, we have no dup or cannonical issues. We have about 24,000 pages total indexed in MSN and those rank fine and show a Meta Description as well.