Forum Moderators: mack
The serps were OK ish yesterday, now they have rolled back to that junk results index they tried a few weeks back.
They must be having a laugh, nothing on MSN is currently even remotely on target now following this change.
Are they working off the sample data set they used last time?
Its such a dam shame - msn have so much potential, googles results are currently in a mess with the supplemental problems and everything else and this is a time that MSN COULD do some damage, but what do they do - roll back to that junk index they had to withdraw a few weeks back.
This morning the serps were about 70% right they are now about 2% - Amazing
I have a few small sites, and a mediocre blog I started up at the end of last year. One of the gadgets I reviewed on my blog was the WMS 801 weather station with MSN Direct from Oregon Scientific ...
My traffic for that story disappeared from search results quite some time ago - I assumed it was because I wasn't updating my blog enough to appear "important" to the SE's. But just for kicks I just ran a search on MSN on a phrase that used to reliably get me hits on the first page:
"WMS 801" review
The most popular result now, in four pages? Some made-for-search site that obviously posts the same article across 30-40 different properties, in exactly the same manner (note the same "viewarticle.jsp?id=38444" in all the link URLs). The properties portray themselves to be animation artist sites, digital video production sites, Mac sites, iPod sites. Total crap. Yet MSN seems to love them for its results pages.
And Google's a mess these days with the new algorithms. Yuck -- what a horrible time to be starting up new web sites and writing content.... can't get love from anyone.
Bad news - i find the results are still as dire as normal. I just dont know how they do it. Its amazing how poor the msn serps are.
Do you think anyone at msn is even interested in the quaility of the serps?, or is it a case of to many yes men at msn who believe their own BS that the search is the best already and will overtake everyone because of IE7 so they dont need to pay it much attention.
A number of sites we work on rank great in msn so i should be jumping with joy, but users are just not going to stick with msn, if a search produces only 10% or 20% relevancy you are going to give up using it very quickly imo.
Poor results damage the good sites listed imo if junk or non relevent sites are listed next to your own.
As a private test, i set our home computer default page to msn from Yahoo to see if my wife (who has no internet experience) would notice the differance using the msn search bar over Yahoos. Within moments of her searching for sites on the net with the msn search bar she wanted it put back, she said she couldnt find relevent sites with it, i have now changed it back.
In closing, msn have had a good period now to do something with the search and failed. Its a complete pile of junk and imo they should just scrap it, save the money and resign with Yahoo like it was in the past before they started playing with something they are clearly out of their depth with.
Its amazing how poor the msn serps are.
You are absoultely correct. I have been emailing them about the subdomain spam for over a year now. MSNdude even specifically asked some people for examples of the subdomain spam here at WW. But nothing at all has happened to correct it. It is only getting worse. I don't think MSN has had an "update" that utilizes any algorithmic improvements in months.
Absolutely horrible, and getting to be quite humorous (if you have enough traffic from Y and G and can see the humor in the silliness that is MSN).
C
