Can I Remove Site from MSN

[Jimville]

MSN has over 15,000 pages indexed for my site. My site has less than 2,500 pages. How can I remove the whole thing from their index and start over with a new xml sitemap.

I have already removed it from their Webmaster Cenral. A MSN rep has informed that that will not remove the site from their index. He did not give me the courtesy of telling me how to remove it from the index.

Thanks. Jim

[Receptional]

Someone will tell you you just need to update your robots.txt, but that won't work in getting pages already indexed kicked out.

Sounds to me like you have a duplicate URL issue. If you REALLY want to get it out of the index, then you would need to serve cloaked content to MSNBot only giving a 301 redirect to the home page... every time the spider looks at an old URL, it should then in theory update to the home page, thus taking it out of the index.

BUT... that's not what I would advize. It's a lot of effort and who knows if MSNBot will understand it properly anyway. I think you need to find out why MSN has indexed so many more URLs than you think you have. Then you need to find a way to make it impossible for anyone (humans and bots) to see multiple urls for the same content. You should do this by redirecting users to a standard URL syntax (OK - if P1R is reading... URI syntax). The redirect should again be a 301 and you need to also be careful that you don't 301 a 301 (Redirect stuff already redirecting).

Then... human or computer... the system should correct itself over time.

There may be a short term downside here. Google may also see al the 301s and cause you a short term bit of grief as I've been hearing that wholesale changes are Google's current pet subject - but there's no substitute long term for doing things right... and that is to avoid dupliacte URLs

[edited by: Receptional at 3:02 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2008]

[Jimville]

Any idea how I can find out why MSN has indexed so many more URLs than you think you have?

[Marcia]

Actually, that count of the number of pages indexed is wrong on every single site I've ever seen. If you click your way down far enough (the end for a small site), that number will change to something more like what it really is.

That number of pages figure has been wrong 100% of the time for as far back as I can remember.

[Jimville]

Thanks, Marcia. You're right! My site map has about 2,500 pages. Today, page 1 says I have 13,000 pages. I went to page 20. It said there are 1,000 pages. Microsoft should be very proud.

[spacecadet2]

The original question was - does MSN have a URL removal link (like Google and Yahoo) that allows someone to remove one or more of their MSN natural search listings?

Based on the previous responses - I assume not. Just wanted to make sure...

Thanks

[ZydoSEO]

I found some posts on Live's forums asking this. The moderator gave this response as to how to get them removed:

Please email the URLs to [e-mail] with "URL Removal Request" in the subject line.

You can give that a shot.

[Jimville]

ZydoSEO,

Thanks. Unfortuantely, email was returned:
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients.