URLs suddenly gone

[missgirl]

Since two weeks some of my domains are suddenly gone in MSN search, before they had been on good positions on the first page. And only the index page is gone, the others are still there. Is anybody experiencing the same thing?

[BillyS]

missgirl -

MSN seems to be in more flux than any of the engines. I experienced a drop in count using the site: command, but that seemed to have corrected an overstatement. In other words, I've got roughly 1,000 pages but MSN used to show 3,500. It now shows around 1,000 pages.

To answer your question, my index page is still showing on MSN. And spidering is pretty aggressive too.

[missgirl]

Well I had this same problems some months before and the URl came back after few weeks. Only it happend now with more URL and all had good positions in the ranking:(

[LunaC]

Same thing happened to me on the 23 of December. The site had good ranking, still shows well over 5000 backlinks but all but 3 inner pages are gone.

They can't even be found by site: or typing the actual url in.

While MSN isn't a huge traffic provider for me I need all I can get since Google is having the duplicate url issue still for that site. (www and non www, 301'd months ago and no change in serp, no terms back.)

Searching "my site name" with quotes brings up 12,967 results, none of which are my site, from what I can see it's mostly people linking to me.

This has me wondering if there really is something I've done wrong... maybe a server issue? 301 problems? Tripped a filter? I've racked my brain to find the answer and am still coming up blank.

Did yours disapear on the same day?

MSN is still spidering fine for me, has it been crawling your site regularly to?

[missgirl]

Yes, same with me.It startet around christmas. If I type the url inside, MSN cannot find it. If I check for links, all links from other pages are there.

I hope that this is only a technical issue from MSN, because like I wrote, it happened earlier also and the page came back.
It scared me only that today it happened with another page also.

missgirl

[MetricsGuru]

I'm having the same problem with one of my clients - we were doing very well in MSN for many of our keywords relating to house plans.

All of a sudden - we are gone! I can't find our urls for the life of me. We did not change anything on the site for several months.

I don't even know how to find out if a competitior did something or what?

Any suggestions?

[RichTC]

Have a similar problem on one of the sites we work on.

Pages are falling off for no reason. On using the site command it returns 650 pages which is less than 1% of the sites content.

I noticed that some pages return the page title with the following in the description field rather than the meta description on the page:-

"To get the most out of the XXXX site please either enable Javascript or download a newer version of your favoutite browser - Mircosoft Explorer Mozilla Firefox Alternatively please follow "

On watching the recent video clip of the two msn guys talking about the search engine learning from itself i do wonder if the have a major problem with this search facility.

I would say they are trying to be smart by reading a sites pages in a dfferent browser and it clearly doesnt work - rather than trying to be cleaver they should try and get the basic search right first - such as deep indexing of websites for a start

In this example msn clearly does not cash all of the sites pages despite the site being an established site and authority with thousands of backlinks nor does the bot fully index the site when it visits.

On the face of it i would say that the site has triggered some sort of filter and thats why its a)not deep spidering the site and b) not indexing the pages and c) removing pages it allready has in its index - whats causing this im clueless of!

Currently based on other sites we work on i would say that if you knock together a thin site low on content, with keyword domain name you will rank top for that keyword very easily. In one example a site with one page but loads of links to it ranks high in an extreamly sought after sector.

All in all, its still early days for the search but i think its got serious problems and issues that need fixing.

Rich

[outland88]

Same here. Page count begin dropping after Christmas and continues. MSN Bot still crawling as much if not more than ever. At first I thought it might be some duplication issues but since they're knocking out so much of my original content I don't think so now.

[SuddenlySara]

same here, too...
had great results than around Christmas my index dropped. Now many pages are starting and have dropped out. MSN spider has been busier than ever too.
I don't redirect non www to www both are out there with great PR and listings from Google. Could that be something?

[encyclo]

"To get the most out of the XXXX site please either enable Javascript or download a newer version of your favoutite browser - Mircosoft Explorer Mozilla Firefox Alternatively please follow "

Is this text on your page? Are you doing user agent sniffing (JS or server-side), and what happens if the UA string doesn't meet your requirements?

[outland88]

>I don't redirect non www to www both are out there with great PR and listings from Google. Could that be something?<

Never had a problem with this in MSN. May relate to WhoIs data or DMOZ. A few said it could relate to those who advertise with Adwords but I haven't seen much feedback on that.

[Balle]

Same here - my index page is gone today......

This has happened once before but it came back a couple of days later.

[MetricsGuru]

I contacted the head of MSN Search because my client was fed up with losing all our rankings; got a response and it's been escalated.

Have not heard back since then - I guess they are working on the problem. It clearly is a problem because most of us did not change anything and were doing well for our keywords - and then - Presto....we're Gone.

I ran a ranking report for the first 1000 search results and could not find any of my urls for any of hundreds of keywords in MSN Search - so I know something is definately wrong. In fact, I sent MSN the ranking reports I took on December 2nd, when it last looked normal and I prepared a monthly report for my client, and January 1st. My January 1st report was empty...I had nothing. We went into the Phamtom Zone....along with a bunch of other people's sites...and we don't even know why.

[Jon_King]

Speaking to the original topic, I had the same disappearance but now they are back of a few hours ago.

[MetricsGuru]

That's great but there's been no change for my client - and I just checked.

[budterm]

Index page gone. Dont know when it started. Lots of other pages still there, but the index page used to rank high for a variety of term.

[Balle]

My index page is now back ranking as before it dissapered...

There is a new cache from yesterday for my site.

This is the second time (at least) this has happened for my site.

My site has 1000's of unique pages of content. Quality content in my opining.

The other sites ranking for this keyword ar mostly subdomains with little to no unique conotent...I have noticed that they never seem to dissapear like my site... don't know if that means anything.

[missgirl]

Two of my pages are also back, but the most important page is still gone since Christmas. Hopeflly it will also return, this is so irritating.

[LunaC]

Now all my pages are gone. I don't advertise with Adwords, so I'm doubting that is the cause for sites disapearing (it is for mine at least anyway).

I do keep my whois info private, and am starting to wonder if that's doing more harm than good. I just got tired of phone calls at all hours from advertisers wanting adspace. Often they seemed to forget to check the difference in timezone.

[mini-rant totally off topic] Why in the world do companies phone if I clearly state on my sites that I do not accept calls, don't list my phone number and give them a convenient contact form instead. Grr. Drives me nuts.[end rant.. feeling better]

[outland88]

MSN is actually notorious for dropping sites and pages but they usually come back fairly quickly. Most people normally don’t notice because they probably don’t see much business from them or the page rankings have just shifted. This though seems to be something major that started in the vicinity of Christmas.

[msndude]

We've been trying out some new spam algorithms lately. You'll probably see results fluctuating and may even see some pages missing for the next couple weeks while we work out some issues.

[Jon_King]

Appreciate the heads-up.

[SuddenlySara]

Thanks for responding MSNDude...
But Dude give me back my index page! No spam on there.
I do advertise with adwords and would advertise with you too if I could? Filled out your request for advertise invite a while back with no answer.

My index is the same with or without www and no redirects cause the sites been live for eight years with no problems ever in other search engines so...
do you have new filters giving me a dupe penalty?

[stu_uk]

my page has also gone today, i stuffed a few more keywords in yesterday and now my page has been wiped off the map.

[stu_uk]

after sniffing around a bit i found that when i enter the exact url of my index.php page into msn i get the following message

-------------
We are seeing an increased volume of traffic by some malware software. In order to protect our customers from damage from that malware, we are blocking your query. A few legitimate queries may get flagged, and for that we apologize. Please be assured that we are hard at work on this problem and hope to get it resolved even better as soon as possible.
If you are using phpBB, please check out the phpBB downloads site *************** and make sure you are not vulnerable.

- MSN Search Team
-------------

[missgirl]

I have just tried with my index.php and the same happened

missgirl

[followgreg]

Good to get some info from msndude.

My company launched 2 new sites and even though I used to like MSN a lot I find ridiculous to see these 2 sites disapearing even while typing the unique domain name itself.

>>>MSNdude: Are you guys implementing new filters, for example those sites mentioned above have quite a few 'empty' pages generated by a CMS for the future navigation so they are all having the same content (or almost)waiting for copywriters to do the job - Could MSN penalize for that? Because even Google picked them up pretty well.

Hopefully MSN will keep one of its main advantage over Google and Yahoo (oohhh I hate Yahoo :) ) - Fast indexing is sooooo great, no duplicate issues, no 302 issues, no index page issue....until recently...

[Genie]

My non-profit, informational site has gone completely from MSN since Christmas. It carries no advertising of any kind, sells nothing, and has no Whois data (since it is hosted in free space provided by my ISP.)

It has links from numerous academic sites and the BBC. It has no dubious outbound links. It uses no dubious techniques.

It seems a shame that the very necessary fight against spam is doing so much collateral damage.

[followgreg]

I agree with genie, not sure what is being fought there but hopefully MSN will find the way to homepages faster the Google did...it killed some websites and can't find improvements so far

[stu_uk]

my site is now back in the index although its dropped from pos 1 to pos 3 for target keyword, my guess is i tripped a desnity filter on the tile attribute.