How long to get indexed in Microsoft Search?

[nickreynolds]

One of my sites dropped out of the index on 28th Sept - did something happen around that time? Anyway only realised last week. So have used the submit website page at Microsoft and have added a sitemap. How long do you think I need to wait and what should I do if it doesn't get indexed soon. It has PR2 in Google and is about two years old. No robots.txt file or re-directs.

[Reno]

Some of other threads in this forum reflect the same experience that you are having -- established sites dropped out of the index, no new crawling, incorrect readings of robots.txt, and more. As far as I can see, something DID happen, and whatever it was, the engineers at MS put their crawler on the wrong path. Will they ever fix it? Will the dropped sites ever return to the index? Will Santa Claus finally reveal himself? Given the current state of affairs with LIVE, the third question may resolve itself before the first two.

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[nickreynolds]

I had forgotten about them, which was why it's taken so long for me to notice. However, even though i only get about 5% - 8% of my traffic from them, it's caused a dent in my earnings, so I'm trying to sort it. Encouraged to see, FishTex that things are gettting back to normalk for you

[nickreynolds]

Still waiting to get indexed. Thought i'd rattle off an email to Live search support. They say the problem may be because i don't have a robots.txt file. Well I thought you only needed one if you wanted to exclude bots from part of your site. None of my other sites have one. So made the appropriate file and we'll see what happens!

[walrus]

Unreal, after all this time we are still going through canonization issues. Yahoo returns equal results with or without www and Google is almost identical but Live search, found non www but shows no results for www version. They dont even show any of the 200 odd inlinks.
What year is this?

[MadeWillis]

Poke around over at the Live search search blog. They claim to have made major update right around the time you mentioned
[blogs.msdn.com...]

"It's our biggest update since our debut in January 2005."

[Reno]

They claim to have made major update right around the time you mentioned

It can't be a coincidence that within days of the "grand" announcement, numerous webmasters at various online boards were beginning to report serious issues. Almost certainly that's when the trouble started, and it seems they haven't fixed it yet. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, they've not even acknowledged that things aren't right... and that's not a good sign.

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[nickreynolds]

Yay.
Homepage now indexed - well its a start!

[Reno]

Homepage now indexed - well its a start!

I don't mean to sound discouraging, but for many people, the home page is the ONLY page that will show up in MSN, even after months and months of waiting. I'll be eager to hear if they get the rest of your pages -- if they do get most of them, please report back, so we'll have a sense of how long it took.

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[simey]

Does your site contain affiliate links?

MSN is mis-indexing millions of pages under the affiliate merchants domains.

Do a simple site:(affiliate domain) search at msn to see what I mean...

[Marcia]

I posted in detail about the affiliate links issue here in the affiliate forum:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[nickreynolds]

Don't think it's the affiliate thing. still only one page indexed!

[nickreynolds]

7 weeks now since homepage got indexed but the bot hasn't been back! Have had some communications with helpline but the last thing I got was such gobbldegook I couldn't understand what it meant!

However, one of my other sites which for a while only had 37 pages indexed is now up to 137! Yipee.

[nizlernet]

I have scene the same thing about 5 days ago on a few sites. The index dropped but all the other pages are still in place when you do site:. MSN get your sh_t together!

You are all not alone in this, this has happened to many of my sites and they are re included usually within a few days however sometimes can be more around a month...

[Lightguy1]

I have never had any luck with MSN no matter what. They have had my homepage indexed for a while, along with only 25 other pages. Google and yahoo both take my 10k+ pages no issue. I can not get MSN to index better as hard as I try. It seems its an issue with them?

[nickreynolds]

Got a further reply that sheds some light:
[snip]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 6:29 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2008]
[edit reason] Sorry,w e can't do proprietary email quotes in the forums [/edit]

[Reno]

Nick,

That is the most amazing bit of info that I've seen in this MS/LIVE forum in a very long time -- thanks for sharing it. At least there may be some hope.

If I may ask -- did you get that update in an email from MS support? Or did you see it at a blog somewhere? Just wondering how widely they are posting this important news, given that the decline of LIVE last autumn is a subject of much discussion all over the internet.

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[Fish_Texas]

Yes, thanks for sharing that...I had given up on MSNLive...but now there is hope for getting back our traffic.
Fish Texas

[nickreynolds]

wahoo! Half my site is now indexed!.
In reply to Reno, they sent it me in an email. Way back before xmas I went through webmaster help at the webmaster live tools page, and got to this bit where you could submit a query. They sent me an email saying basics like ensure you have a robots.txt and sitemap. I just kept emailing back when i'd done what they said and then reminding them when they didn't reply!
Anyway, like a day after that email, suddenly loads of ages are indexed!

[nickreynolds]

doh! - just seen that the email quote has been edited out. To paraphrase, It basically says...we know there are problems...the algos are too strict... we hope to have it all sorted in late spring

[Reno]

Nick,

Thanks for the reply regarding the source of the info, and congratulations on breaking through the logjam -- now let's hope the rest of us get some good news when we check to see how many pages we have indexed at MSN/LIVE. Your experience gives me hope that all is not totally lost.

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[rustybrick]

Microsoft told me this isn't an official MSNDude post, but they never got back to me with more details. It seems like something is up.

Did anyone else notice their sites getting indexed in Live Search?

[nickreynolds]

Doh!
Back to just three pages indexed. Gone to Webmaster Live Tools and it syas three pages indexed and last crawl was 5th December! Yeah right!

[Marcia]

>>Did anyone else notice their sites getting indexed in Live Search?

No, and with the sites that were a problem I put up a robots.txt exclusion for msnbot.

There's nothing in the world wrong with those sites - including it not being my problem or my fault if they've been indexing URLs in links with dynamic strings instead of web pages (and kicking the web pages out, replaced by tracking URLs); so until their end is straightened out I don't even want to bother looking regarding sites that got messed up.

[Robert Charlton]

...if they've been indexing URLs in links with dynamic strings instead of web pages (and kicking the web pages out, replaced by tracking URLs); so until their end is straightened out I don't even want to bother looking regarding sites that got messed up.

It feels that Microsoft hasn't been doing a good job prioritizing old urls, and hasn't been indexing new ones. I've noticed for probably a couple of years now that MSN has had trouble with tracking-urls that simply do not show up on other engines.

Ditto with canonical problems (on sites that don't have server control, but nevertheless don't have these problems appearing on other engines).

Ditto with continuing to show dropped pages and not picking up new ones.

[5ubliminal]

MSN Indexing is a JOKE. Those coders should all be fired and sued. A new team must be brought in, index must be reset and wiped completely and they should start over from scratch.

They don't index new sites past homepage and sitemap.xml if you're lucky. A VisualBasic script kiddie can write a better crawler then what they got.

They are also robots.txt challenged. They can't read it and they certainly don't understand it.

Pfffff... thinking these guys actually get paid for their jobs really peaces me off. They should be charged money for the mess they got that search engine into.

If they were to buy Yahoo! ... would they mess them up too?:)

[5ubliminal]

Forgot to mention the msnbot-media r4pes your sites so I guess they can find them or the msnbot-media team is just ... BETTER!

[AlliG]

Does MSN offer Paid Inclusion anymore? If so, can you please provide me the link. I cannot seem to get my website in MSN's index. I found the link to submit my site to MSN for free and I also have the Microsoft Adcenter link. But do they offer Paid Inclusion? I cannot seem to find any information on it.

Thanks!