MSN dropped 99% of pages

why?

[RoySpencer]

After many months of having thousands of our pages indexed by MSN Search, it has now dropped to just 85. Does anyone have ideas why this might be?
Some of the content on most pages changes hourly (but titles and headings do not). Google and Yahoo continue to have tens of thousands of our pages indexed.
Thanks for any insight.

[LeoXIV]

same things happening here .... from 900+ to 50!

[HRoth]

This happened to me - actually, all 400 pages disappeared. Then only the index page came back, url only. I really thought I had been penalized for something, although I honestly had no idea what. So I wrote to ask them why my site had been removed. That was Thursday or Friday. Today I got an answer - said they were having problems with their bot and that I had been removed by accident, along with a lot of other people's sites. Said they had resubmitted my site for crawling but that I shouldn't expect it to be back in for up to four weeks. So maybe this happened to you guys too.

[LeoXIV]

yes it sorta looks like a bot/algo malfunctioning...

PS: did it happen overnight for you guys or gradually?

[HRoth]

Overnight for me. One day I was ranked number one or in the top five for my search terms, and the next day my entire site was completely gone.

This experience has made me think that perhaps a number of sites that get dumped in other search engine updates are in fact not using black-hat tactics but just get crunched like I did.

I was impressed that MSN had the guts to admit they made a mistake.

[LeoXIV]

one of my sites dropped overnite (50->1) just the homepage.
the other one was more gradual perhaps during 10 days, which make the matter more confusing!

[LeoXIV]

interesting:

WW's indexed pages in MSN :76,470
WW's indexed pages in Google:978,000

[Balle]

I just lost the index page - happent overnight.

As far as I can see all other pages on the site are still in the index - exept the homepage.

It's not showing up when i do a search for my site "wwWebmasterWorldebsite.com"? No high risk SEO - only some link exchanges.

"wwWebmasterWorldebsite.com" is a major money term and I was ranking #4

[richy blueeye]

Yes I had the same experience went from number one for my keywords to my index page only showing an URL. The rest of my pages appear to be indexed but the main page is non-existant.

[gmiller]

I recommend emailing MSN about it. The home page on one of my sites disappeared some time back, so I contacted them and was told that they had a problem on their side (refreshing honesty *and* a quick response), and had lost some pages that had been submitted by hand in the past rather than being found solely by their spider. They took care of me manually.

It took a number of weeks for the URL to reappear in an URL: search and it's still listed URL-only at the moment, but it'd still be completely gone if I hadn't simply asked them about it.

[RichTC]

Same for us in the UK, Prior to the algo change over 4000 pages indexed, now down to about 300 and falling every day.

Meanwhile Google and Yahoo have thousands indexed. I have contacted msn UK twice so far. Both times i got a reply saying it was being passed onto technical, then nothing.

Ive given up with them anyway, i cant see any reason for a penulty we are a very high page rank site in Google, we run a detailed site with plently of rich content, it did rank well on MSN prior to the update, so they changed something which had the effect of removing our own pages from the index rather than adding to them!.

[RichTC]

Anyone have any ideas on this - pages in index reducing?

Also i notice sometimes my index page shows up top 4 results in MSN serps then 12 hrs later its gone!

Do you think MSN have applied some sort of penalty? or is the new algo just plain faulty?

[RoySpencer]

With the greatly reduced number of pages, we are also seeing SERPS positions drop out of sight on most of the remaining pages...but not all. It does seem to act like some sort of penalty: I can enter the exact set of seven keywords from the HTML title from one of the pages, and the page doesn't show up in the top 250 results (despite being #1 in Yahoo and Google).

[GaryS]

I have been trying for some time to discover why for certain keywords I am highly ranked with Google and Yahoo but constantly losing ground with MSN. Yet my back links, relevancy and coding are all solid.

The answer it seems is the pernicious use of Google ads on my front page!

None of the sites ranking above me have them. My decline from front page to off the map coincides with the implementation and recent competing MSN text ads.

[edited by: engine at 3:52 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2005]
[edit reason] language [/edit]

[ramachandra]

Yes my site pages too dropped, but SERPs are doing well for all of my keywords. Number of backlinks are same.

Anybody found why a sudden drop of pages from cache?

[ageingguy]

"we run a detailed site with plently of rich content" are you sure it's rich? I have a feeling MSN is looking more at unique content.

[RichTC]

Yes it is rich in content - Hows your site doing in MSN!

MSN likes keyword urls, Keyword titles, exact anchor links, thin sites with static pages and likes to skim/ top surface sites.

Its very easy to rank 1 in msn if you want to but it can cost you position in google.

Currently MSN is not worth the effort due to a) the results being so poor and b) the low level of traffic reach it has anyway.