Forum Moderators: mack
At the expense of repeating myself, I'm going to repeat myself. :-) Here are the guidelines I'm trying to follow when I post here:
I won't discuss the problems of particular sites in any public forum. As long as I can handle the volume, I'm happy to get "sticky" messages, though.
I also won't discuss competitors here -- they have their own forums, and I figure they already have enough people talking about them. :-)
I will not preannounce anything specific here; I might say "we're working extra hard over the summer to fight Spam," but I'm not going to post something like "look for a giant spam-killer release on April first!" After a release goes out and someone notices it, THEN I'll comment on it. If no one notices it, it probably wasn't worth talking about anyway.
Finally, I'm not going to reveal any secret Intellectual Property that would help someone build their own search engine or hack ours. Most of it's hard to explain anyway. :-)
[edited by: engine at 1:54 pm (utc) on June 5, 2006]
Type in "?q=Degrees" on MSN .. 39,000 results ..all have?q=Degress trailing
I take it no one has any idea on what "?q=Degress" means?
I thik it signals a penalty but would appreciate some other looks/views
if you look at all the sites that have "?q=Degress" trailing their domains ..
All those sites have 1 of 2issues ..either flash on the page OR Parked pages..
and damn it just clicked in with me!
Iwasgoing to say my site does not use flash and it isnt pparked .. BUT ..
I have the site listed for Sale with one of th eparking companies and you are required to place their Javescript stats counted on all your pages so prospective buyers can verify your traffic ..!
So while the site isnt a "Parked" page there is that association with a parking service!
Now I'm all for Parked domains NOT ranking in the SE's ...
I guess we got caught in a filter to catch those
I'm thinking out loud.. Am I making any sense
Also, I'm not sure how someone figures H1 tags hurt your relevance (or help it, for that matter), but it's certainly nothing we've ever told people to do (or not do).
What we DO say is "make your sites friendly for your human users." A pretty good definition of spam is "web pages designed for search engines, not for people," so design what you think people should like and you shouldn't go far wrong.
Just make your site as you wish ok black text on black background is not good, but why would you do that in the first place.
The results we see in from Asia / ninemsn Australia are great, I also tried searches as examples for other parts of the world and on our regional MSN the results were clean and good, also people have mentioned Brazil.
Why is that ninemsn, Brazil and searches we get in Asia seem clear and good regardless of what you are searching for worldwide, but the .com results are so different?
I'm quite sure q=Degrees is something those sites are using for some purpose of their own. It's certainly nothing MSN Search is putting into their URLs! :-)
my point msndude is I think MSN IS adding q=Degrees to some urls .
i's on MY URL and I didnt put it there ..that's why I am asking
You have your work cut out thats for sure!
Currently i see a three page site that is www.keywordsdomain.com ranking 1st of 6.5 million results - The page says comming soon with the keywords on the page three times and no other content it has 5 backlinks from own sites.
Meanwhile a number of authority sites rich in content regarding the search keywords are 20+ in your serps
Your serps are currently a spammers dream!
As has been mentioned before, anything that improves general relevance also makes spam worse, since spam pages are the ones that fool the system into thinking they're more important than they really are. As a result, any improvements in relevance always generate complaints about increasing spam as well.
On the other hand, anything that attacks spam always generates complaints about sites that got hit even though they're not really spam. We call these "false positives." Sadly, you can't make progress without false positives, but we're keen on minimizing the number of them, so we listen closely when anyone reports that their site disappeared completely.
As a result, unless we make changes with care, any single "fix" is apt to create as many problems as it solves. This is a lot like trying to fix a bubble under the linoleum!
Summary: We really are listening, and we really are planning improvements, but all the problems will not be fixed in a single release, nor will they all be fixed tomorrow. Try to be patient a little longer, and keep watching.
since spam pages are the ones that fool the system into thinking they're more important than they really are
This is true for sure, however there have been hundreds of great suggestions from webmasters at this forum who have used the Internet since it's inception that would be more effective at combatting spam sites. Several suggestions of late in the threads for both MSN and Google make real, rational sense.
Sometimes listening to the webmaster can provide a real insight into combatting the issues that plague most SE's today. I find that the comments from most SE ambassadors seems to reflect an almost 'we can't trust you' attitude as they often believe webmasters are out to decieve the engines.
Note: I did mention several websites who ranked on the first page for keywords and were absolutely trashed in this update (one was removed from the index twice accidentally and then reinstalled, without the previous ranks, after an email from msn webspam who did apologize for the error. The website in question is still off the 28th page for its topics.)
Huge shopping sites that have been rooted on the net since 1997 should be found fairly easily if they are quality sites with good content and play by the rules. Not burried or delisted. Even my competitors sites deserve to be in the mix, but now are pretty much all gone. These results, at least in our sector, border nutty.
Of the huge number of pages viewed on our site daily, 1% is from msn now - Before this update msn accounted for 10% of our traffic.
I may need a SHRINK to explain this improvement to me.
But lets forget my site. I always used MSN to search for my favorite sites in movies, property, games and other private stuff. Those authority sites are also disappeared and nowhere to be found.
Its look like reversing the result from Google and Yahoo. Page #1000 on Yahoo is now #1 on MSN. (With some exception though. Some authority sites are still in MSN SERP)
The index page has once again been removed from the msn.com index. Instead of spending any time on this I am going to move on until msn can figure out what they are doing on their end.
Cheers,
Todd
I got a couple of real resposes first, where the support person asked me to contact webspam@msn.com should I feel there is an issue, which I did. My site was removed that night for the first time, and got removed twice more (now is the latest part of the saga.
Although we do have a mechanism to remove sites quickly, we use it sparingly. (As in "not every month.") This isn't likely to happen unless your site is illegal or something like that.
When a site is marked as spam, it tends to disappear gradually -- like the Cheshire cat. If webspam decides the site really wasn't spam and changes the marking, the site comes back in the same, gradual fashion.
If you think we've dropped important authority sites, I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to send me a sticky and (as long as I can handle the volume) I'll look at it. If it's YOUR site, don't consider this a substitute for e-mailing webspam, though; it won't hurt to tell both of us, and their mailbox is a lot less likely to fill up! :-)
For the general spam problem, no one should expect quick fixes. (I know I keep saying this.) Look for progress over the course of the summer -- not all at once in a single, magic update.
For the general spam problem, no one should expect quick fixes. (I know I keep saying this.) Look for progress over the course of the summer -- not all at once in a single, magic update.
Makes sense for sure. However, we were told that this was not a spam problem, instead that 'millions of incorrect pages had been introduced to the index', so many webmasters expected something quicker than the quagmire currently exisiting in the msn serps.
Thanks for visiting and liaising with webmasters, its good to see!
Todd
I've now corresponded with quite a few of you, running specific queries against the old and the new versions of the neural net, and while I've found one or two that are worse with the new one, the majority are either the same or better. Where someone has seen something get sharply worse, it's always been the result of a site being marked as Spam.
I'm still keenly interested in examples of queries that produced good results under the old network (or the "Brazil" net, even, if that's your favorite) but which are "random garbage" with the current US Production net. So far, though, I have exactly one example that comes anywhere close to that bad.
I didn't know that spam sites were removed gradually instead of cold turkey and I do wonder if this sends the right message to spammers. I, for one, don't want to spam but I do want to optimise my sites. Because it can be a thin line between optimisation and spam, wouldn't it be better to remove a spam site instantly? A gradual decline in ranking can be for many reasons and may leave many webmasters confused on which side of the line they are.
I hope msndude and his peers agree that search engine optimisation isn't a bad thing per sé. I see it as improvement of communication with search engines, as long as it's on par with the actual quality of content.
As for specifics, on some keyphrases pages with a substantial amount of text seem to have dropped. That may explain the rise of affiliate site, which often have just images of products and links. Is on-page optimisation regarded as spam?
We're looking at ways to speed up the effect of dropping spam pages, but most of our effort is focused on just doing a better job of detecting them.
Msndude seems rather phlegmatic under such loss of relevance.
Also, there is so much weight on domains that on one high volume keyword the old #1 is now #1,2,3,4 and 8.
I also find better Y results regardless of subject or part of the world using Y Asia or Y7 Australia than using the standard Y search.
Please report spam to webspam@microsoft.com. It's okay to report it to me too, but I may or may not have time to deal with it. The webspam e-mail address is the official place to report spam -- and also to protest that an excellent non-spam domain appears to have been removed by mistake.
We do have different nets customized for different markets, but a net crafted for Brazil should not, on average, give better results for US English queries, although there might be individual exceptions. That said, we can learn a great deal from those exceptions, I appreciate the examples that people have sent me on this, and I'd be happy to see more.
Finally, we are aware of the subdomain problem. Consistent with my rule on not preannouncing anything, I'm not going to offer a timeframe for fixing it, other than to say that it's high on our list.
A simple snippet of bad code can majorily tank rankings, ie... a bad href tag
Plus, making sure everything is W3C compliant helps the end user as they use different internet browsers.
Good to hear that you guys are working on subdomain spam.
Abit off the core for this thread (but highly related since you are working on defining authority sites a lot IMO):
I'm not sure if someone has pointed this out in this thread but I still wonder why MSN is willing to use DMOZ descriptions and give sites listed there as eventually carrying more weight over SERP's.
For the least DMOZ is obsolete due to its huge backlogs and at most there is a huge lack of integrity throughout editors in a lot of categories.
Why not using the SBD, you guys control quality there? no?
Still I like singapore results the best
