E-consultancy not in MSN Search? Prize for reasons why not...

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Adam Crawford Gold
SEO at Cheapflights Media

10 November 2006 16:59pm

Yes, an outrageous glitch apparently, and one that I'm sure MSN be working on fixing.
On 16:19:09 10 November 2006 matt wrote:

My only reservation to all of this though is that I can't see how that rule of removing pages which are duplicated could be applied to all sites with much success. Most sites support URLs with campaign IDs passed in for tracking purposes, querystring parameters for affiliates amongst others. Unless you force a redirect for all parameters in the URL, then how would this work i.e. if I wanted to remove a page on a competitors site from an MSN index all I would need to do is link to the page with different querystrings such as:
http://www.microsoft.com/?remove1
http://www.microsoft.com/?remove2
http://www.microsoft.com/?remove3
The home page of Microsoft is now duplicated for three different URLs and is outside of their control. Lets see if they are removed from their own MSN index now :)
Surely this could not be the case?

Matt
Adam Crawford Gold
SEO at Cheapflights Media

13 November 2006 09:21am

A quick follow up on this issue...
To compound matters, MSN isn't handling 301 redirects particularly well at the moment.
It appears to be caching the old (redirected) URL, and not (necessarily) indexing the destination URL. I'm running a test on this at the moment, which is not yet conclusive.
So, in the short term you may be better off serving 404's rather than 301's and/or using robots.txt to exclude out dated folders.
On 13:59:16 10 November 2006 AdamCrawford wrote:

OK, I suspect this may end up a long winded description and without a concrete conclusion, but hopefully will be of some use.
A glitch with MSN's duplicate content filter has come to light, whereby when MSN spider 2 or more URL's with identical content ALL pages are dropped from the index, not even leaving the orginal page.

After a bit of digging around the engines I found a few versions of the e-consultancy homepage indexed by Yahoo. It's quite possible deeper pages are similarly effected.

As Yahoo have spidered these pages it is quite possible that MSN has too.

In terms of fixing this, I would imagine a tidy up of some of these URL's might be in order, putting in place 301 redirects back to the homepage where appropriate.

Alternatively, wait for MSN to fix the problem. It's been posted about on blogs and foums, so its likely they will look into it soon.

In the meantime, at least it is MSN and not Google traffic you're missing out on.

Adam
Propellernet
Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

26 January 2007 10:17am

Hi all
Many thanks for all your theories... but I believe we have found the solution so the prize goes to E-consultancy!
Having contacted MSN/LIve in the US direct it appears the reason we're not ranking is simple - a human marked E-consultancy.com as spam.
Reply from MSN was:
"The issue with this site is that one of our human judges marked it as spam. This appears to be an error. We have whitelisted the site and it should show up in the index in the next couple of weeks."
So really we should leave things to the machines to avoid humans messing things up?
Let's see if we do indeed reappear in Live Search in the coming weeks...
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
dan barker Bronze
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker

26 January 2007 12:12pm

hi, Ashley,
I was just about to post to ask if you ever figured this out (one of our domains has a simiilar problem) & see that you have!
You couldn't pass on those MSN contact details could you?
Thanks a lot & well done!
daniel
On 10:17:15 26 January 2007 Ashley wrote:

Hi all

Many thanks for all your theories... but I believe we have found the solution so the prize goes to E-consultancy!

Having contacted MSN/LIve in the US direct it appears the reason we're not ranking is simple - a human marked E-consultancy.com as spam.

Reply from MSN was:

"The issue with this site is that one of our human judges marked it as spam. This appears to be an error. We have whitelisted the site and it should show up in the index in the next couple of weeks."

So really we should leave things to the machines to avoid humans messing things up?

Let's see if we do indeed reappear in Live Search in the coming weeks...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

23 February 2007 14:29pm

Well, it's been almost a month since we were told by MSN that a) we had been manually taken out of their index erroneously and b) we had been manually put back in and "should show up in the index in the next couple of weeks".

I'm not seeing us there - http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=e-consultancy&mkt=en-gb&FORM=LIVSOP

Who knows what's going on but I'm not overly impressed...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Dixon Jones Platinum
Managing Director at Receptional Ltd

26 February 2007 09:24am

So the prize is not yet won...
I have a new contact in Redmond who is responsible for community liason for the algo department and also the community relatoins team in general (although the latter team is mainly AdCenter). I think it's time to alert them to the thread.
Dixon.
Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

28 February 2007 11:49am

Just checked again (http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=e-consultancy&mkt=en-GB&form=QBRE) and we seem to be there...

Dixon - could this be your contact's work? Have you gazumped us to the prize?

Let's see if we stay there (and we'll check what traffic we get as an effective Newbie to Live Search).

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com