Does MSN process 301's properly?

[Mike]

My company had some impressive rankings on MSN that were actually bringing a lot of revenue. However we had room for improvement in that our URLs had session ID's tacked on, so I had our developers implement a 301 redirect for all search engines that requested a page with a session ID -- they'd redirect back to the original page with the ID stripped out.

works fine on google and yahoo, but on MSN we saw a dramatic drop in referrals. I'm patient so I've been playing the waiting game for about 4 weeks now, still nothing.

I'd think this is more than enough time for them to come in, see the redirect, and apply the ranking to the "new" page

anyone else have a similar problem? does their system handle redirects differently than the rest of the world, or is it just slow?


*note that before this change, spiders were never served a session ID in the first place, but if they entered the site through a link that had an ID, the ID would persist and they would index pages under that ID, hence the need for the fix.

[beu]

My company had some impressive rankings on MSN that were actually bringing a lot of revenue. However we had room for improvement in that our URLs had session ID's tacked on, so I had our developers implement a 301 redirect for all search engines that requested a page with a session ID -- they'd redirect back to the original page with the ID stripped out.

works fine on google and yahoo, but on MSN we saw a dramatic drop in referrals. I'm patient so I've been playing the waiting game for about 4 weeks now, still nothing.

I'd think this is more than enough time for them to come in, see the redirect, and apply the ranking to the "new" page

anyone else have a similar problem? does their system handle redirects differently than the rest of the world, or is it just slow?


*note that before this change, spiders were never served a session ID in the first place, but if they entered the site through a link that had an ID, the ID would persist and they would index pages under that ID, hence the need for the fix.

There have been a number of issues with MSN and 301s in the past but they seem to have worked out most of the old problems. That said you could be an exception!

For 301s on MSN the destination URL becomes the canonical URL. For 302s the source URL is used as the canonical URL. I think their "Official" word is that it may take up to 6 weeks to see these changes.

You might also try adding a REFRESH meta tag but be sure the time of the redirect is more than 20 seconds. Not the best user experience but tells spiders you are not up to anything tricky. Good Luck!