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 dont know why they cant handle the blog/comment + subdomain spammers. I thought they could fix it by the SES event, but they havent. Me and a few webmasters follow msn serps regularly, and they were respectable for a year up until about a month ago.
I see some spammers who every spam site in the serps is a subdomain and ends with! or! Buy ----- Cheap! or some similar pattern with -!-!-! (three exclamation points) at the end in the the title. They are all doorway pages to affiliate programs.
In some high profile /affiliate type of keywords they have about 6-7 sites now listed as 1-6 and are the repeated subdomain /Blog / comment link generation spam.
You can go across dozens of industries and the same spammer (i belive its the same spammers) have the subdomain + comment/blog spamming pattern and it fills up the top serps. to the point where you have to go to page 2 or 3 to see the non-spammed results.
I think joe q. public who obviously searches for these phrases and sees the same site(s) repeated on 1-6 1-8, etc in the serps must even know that MSN Search is malfunctioning.
it seems fairly trivial to fix, even temporarily to start just de-value non www subdomains which fit certain patterns (high volume of links to a non www subdomain. that would clear out 95% of it)
I am still seeing sub-domain spam everywhere with no real improvements, and in some areas, they are worse, which I didn't think was possible. I'm running reports right now to target all the subdomain spam to send to MSN yet again to show the problems.
I still believe Microsoft hired the wrong people. Here we are a year later and things are worse, not better, with MSN Search.
Cheers,
CaboWabo
Its not just a sub-domain issue. I dont have a problem with relevent sub domains. Sure if its buy-widgets-cheap.cheapwidgets.com or area1.bluewidgets.com, area2.bluewidgets.com etc etc i would agree with you, it needs cleaning up but in the sectors i watch the sub domain issue isnt that relevent for what ever reason.
The problem they have imo is spam, dclicks post is right, comment sites/ bloggs, junk in the new results table, like one page spam sites, personal bloggs with links and low quality sites that should be in the bin and not ranking top 10 for prime keywords.
As i said before you can build a ten page site about blue widgets with plenty of keyword stuffing. Get a paid for link from a blue widget site have a few outbound links to blue widget sites and bingo the site is 1 in the serps.
On two word search terms the results are full of thin content page sites not an authority in sight!
A few days ago the results were ok ish i would say 70% relevent as at today they are 2% if that. A search in the sectors we watch returns pure junk 1-10 - i just cant genuinely believe how bad it is.
These results look like a wind back to the results they took down a few weeks back, im sure they are the same - this thread will be full of posts within a week imo - msns results are currently just awfull.
Default serps are awful - would someone please close the locker room door!
googles results are currently in a mess with the supplemental problems
Maybe to some webmasters, however, users still see highly relevant results.
If we search on live.com however everything is normal, we are back in the positions that we held and the competitors are back!
I think I'll pass on checking out this putrid, pathetic disgrace further today...
Now I'm nowhere in the top 20 pages! MSN doesn't give me many hits but when you're a new site, you take everything you can get.
I do not see any reason for that.
Monitoring several sites, I do not find a common factor..
I see sites that haven't changed in the last years that sometimes are in the first page, sometimes disappear... Other sites that are increasing links naturally because have good content, disappeared...
In competive market ( travel ) there are several spamming sites....
A lot of junk blog sites and low quality stuff has recently been taken out by the looks of it.
Just noticed, not sure when this kicked in but its is a big improvement
However, it seems to need to be crawled that often to stay in the serps - sometimes MSN does not grab the page from the site and it gets dropped from the index (even though the last crawl was maybe only 7-8 days ago)
Bizarre engine.
MSN please sort out the crawling depth and page retention. (Esp depth for sites with more than 1000 odd pages - deep crawling is still very very poor - and the sites bigger than that have a pathetic representation in the index.)
Pathetic.
No, just the opposite. The homepage comes up when it would better for interior pages to rank (which are more relevant) and it affects conversions to a degree.
They need to work on the deep indexing, get the content in so they can deliver better results on the longer search term requests if they want a serious chance of catching google in the search stakes
This has been a big problem for months. I have contacted msn about this and they don't seem to care. MSN doesn't seem to want to rank interior pages. Instead they will rank the pages linking to the interior pages. For example, if you have an interior page about apples, which is indexed on a page listing interior pages beginning with the letter a, a search for apples will return the index page instead of the interior page. This has been very frustrating and I keep hoping MSN will fix this immediately.
If it could deep index it would be able to provide a much better search facility as it would have more available content.
In one example a large authority site about widgets has about 50 sectors on its home page of these sectors two of them (we will call blue widgets and red widgets) have have exactly the same link on the home page, Red Widgets and Blue Widgets pointing to specific pages about the Red and the Blue subject matter (these are specialist areas).
For this site MSN ranks the Blue Widget page 1 in its results and the Red Widget page hasnt been crawled by the Bot and is not in the msn index. If it cant spider simple index page content like this its no wonder it struggles like hell when the contents one deep off a site map for example or an internal page!
I could give millions of similar examples but in conclusion despite the MSN results showing improvements they still have this deep indexing issue problem - They must know this?
All large sites have the same deep indexing issue, MSN can only cope with about 15-20% of a site if its a large authority. Its bot is currently only effective for blogs and simple 10 page sites!, even a directory like dmoz (which lets face it even gigablast can index) msn cant cope with:-
MSN - 27,000 pages
Gigablast - 207,000 pages
Yahoo - 906,000 pages
Need i post anymore - MSNs bot is next to useless imo.
Rich
P.S perhaps Gigablast should put out a statement saying they are going to deliver the most effective search results within 6 mths (Can anyone recall the month that MSN said we were going to see this miraculous event?) - after all gigabots search bot is 10 times more effective than msns thats for sure!
They still cant deep crawl and now the serps look like they have rolled back to a pile of junk again. Anyone else seeing the same or is it just me?
Its just as well that msn have little reach, despite Googles current mess it looks like Google have nothing to worry about!
Just when you think msns results are improving, they roll out junk!
tried msn on a few searches today and the results were next to useless again
again? Were they ever useful? The subdomain spam just gets worse and worse everyday. I bet Bill Gates is embarrased by this so-called "search engine".
