Looks like MSN updated - Dec. 2005

[Marcia]

Nothing earth-shattering from where I sit, but I'm definitely seeing changes for every keyword I watch that I've checked so far.

[seomike]

yup I'm seeing it on my terms as well. Good update

[Brian M]

I have also been seeing major swings in the page totals for the "site:" command in the past week. Does MSN ever make announcements about upgrades like this?

Our website does quite well with Google and Yahoo. However, many of the terms that are highly ranked on Google and Yahoo are not found on MSN. Also, MSN displays index pages rather that the individual pages where the meat of the content is. We would rather have the users go directly to the individual pages rather than the index(i.e. site map) pages. It looks like MSN has penalized our site or MSN does not go as deep into the content.

Does anyone have any ideas on how you can tell if you have been penalized by MSN and what could cause a MSN penalty.
Thanks,
TryingHard

[Brian M]

Hi tryinghard,

One of my websites was being spammed by sites that were trying to take over the URL name, but they have disappeared in the last week, which is one of the many reasons that led me to believe there was an update happening at MSN.

In other words, a search for "widgets" normally has widgets.com in the #1 spot, but spammers managed to push it down to spot #5 with four totally unrelated sites (only in MSN). I could not even find the term "widget" on any of the cached pages, so they were cloaking to get up on top. Fortunately, they are no longer to be found, and widgets.com is back in its rightful place, as it is on all of the other search engines.

Your post is a little off-topic for this thread, so you may want to consider starting a new thread so visitors will find your question and offer advice (most visitors will not read this thread unless they are curious about an MSN update). However, I can see that you are struggling like I have in the past, so here is my advice in this situation:

Create a site map that gives explicit URLs for each page in your site, and create a "site map" link on the home page for all of the robots to follow.

Do not confuse the robots by using variations of links in your site that differ from those in the site map. It is better to spell out the entire page name the exact same way on every page in your site, rather than have some links that are "widgets/" while other pages in the site have it as "widgets/default.asp" or "WidGets/" because these will be seen by the robots as completely different pages, and you risk triggering a duplicate content filter. Each engine has its own various filters, so there is no way to predict their behavior.

It is frustrating, because you may or may not get a response from the search engines, and in many cases, they will tell you that your site is under no "penalty" that they can see, but I have learned that a filter can make it look as though your site has a penalty against it.

Use the "site:" command to see what pages exist in the database of each engine (i.e. site:www.widgets.com). MSN is not returning all of the pages correctly at the moment, so do not be alarmed unless this continues for another month or two. MSN is combating the rise in search spam, like all of the other engines, so you can expect to see wilds swings. Just remember that the "site:" command is one of your best tools in seeing what the search engine sees.

If all your pages are listed correctly, then you have another problem. And, if you would like to PM me, I will take a look at your site and see what other advice I can offer...

Best of luck!

[Marcia]

Nice post, Brian.

You can also often see changes happen in between updates. I made some structural changes on some pages last weekend, and just a few days later they had the new pages cached, with a change in how the pages were ranking.