Aug
31
MSN Indexing Problems
Filed Under MSN Search | Leave a Comment
As an unfortunate aftermath of the hosting woes of last month, MSN has lost the index page of one of my sites and I can’t seem to get it back in the index no matter what, even though the rest of the site is fully indexed. It’s on a dedicated IP, and I’ve tried forwarding from the IP to the domain name, then taking the redirect off, and submitting both ways a few times - all to no avail.
Well, we’re not “supposed to” use anything but http://www.example.com/ (with the slash) in links, and in fact the index.html is rewritten to the root that way in .htaccess but I’m wondering what will happen if I take that 301 redirection off and link to the index.html page and see if that will get picked up. The site, http://www.allgiftsandhomedecor.com/index.html is what I call my “banner farm” and I have a lot of fun with it trying out different things, seeing how various niches and different merchants do to get ideas of different markets.
I understand that I’m not alone with MSN indexing problems, and that other people are experiencing having whole sites slip out, which I’ve had with another of the sites that got messed up with last month’s server issues. The index page is index, plus two others, and the two “others” keep rotating among other pages on the site, for a daily maximum of three pages out of the whole site, which is about 50-60 pages in size and did fine with MSN before the mishap.
I wish MSN had webmaster tools like Google’s SiteMaps, that would solve it. As it stands, I’m considering putting up a “site map” on another site to see if that’ll get the whole thing indexed. It’s a bit more grey hat than I’d usually consider, but it might be worth a try.
May
5
MSN Homepage Redirection
Filed Under MSN Search | Leave a Comment
They’ve got a 301 redirect on, so msn.com redirects to here:
http://www.msn.com//
With a double forward slash at the end. It’s a 301, but…
Header (Length = 146):
HTTP/1.1·301·Error(CR)(LF)
Location:·http://www.msn.com//(CR)(LF)
Server:·Microsoft-IIS/5.0(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·143(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)Content (Length = 143):
(LF)
Object·Moved
This·document·may·be·found·here< ***/a> (link broken deliberately)
They’ve got the link in the page code going to h*ttp://www.msn.com// with the double slash. Guess it’s not easy for anyone on IIS servers. 
Apr
13
MSN Bug - page count way off
Filed Under MSN Search | Leave a Comment
Doing a search for site: I’m getting (domain examplified):
Page 1 of 295 results containing site:example.com (0.53 seconds) (with SafeSearch: Strict)
No, there are 50 pages indexed, which you can see when you click on page 5 at the bottom. This is happening with every site I check, for quite a while.
Apr
12
Value of MSN Traffic
Filed Under MSN Search | Leave a Comment
There’s a thread going at WebmasterWorld about getting traffic from MSN, with this comment from Robert Charlton
>I can tell you the first page rankings don’t help.
They sure do in certain niches, lucky for me! It can even help to have second page rankings in some cases. There are folks in certain target markets who will search deep and long to find exactly what they’re looking for.
I accidentally found that out a few years ago when doing an SEO consultation on a small client site with a well-defined, very specific target market. That was back when Looksmart and Inktomi results were still running on MSN. I was shocked to find referrals to her site that came from the 5th and 6th pages of MSN search results - legitimate ones. I made a mental note of that, noticed it again and again afterwards, and it’s true to this day.