Lately, MSN Search has displayed weird behaviours: completely removing certain mass traffic generating pages from their index all together. What’s going on? Is it a new spam filter in the works?
Update January 19th: The NFL Lines page is back in the index at #10 in MSN, however, our Online Poker page is now completely gone from the index. I did a recount of our indexed pages, and it has dropped from 21 338 yesterday to 14 383 today. That’s almost 7 000 pages gone from one day to another!
The pattern we are experiencing is that some of our deeper pages just all of a sudden just disappears from the index. This time it was the NFL Lines page. Even a direct search on the URL doesn’t ammount to anything. The page is gone.
Previously, other pages such as our Online Poker page has been removed. Common for all these pages is that they are generating massive ammounts of traffic for the site.
So what is really going on over at MSN Search nowadays? They are indexing and crawling the site, they are even adding pages to their index. From January 10th to January 18th(that’s today), the number of indexed pages in MSN Search has increased from 20 338 to 21 338 - exactly 1000 pages.
Why are they dumping specific pages while adding so many others? MSN is apparently trying out some new spam algorithms, and that might result in pages disappearing and missing for the next couple of weeks while they work out “some issues”.
We already know that MSN uses Search engine spam detection using external data, i.e fetching data from a database containing information about domains that have a history of email spam, but this has to be something else.
There is absolutely no spam on the site, and the entire site is White Hat (probably the only in this business…LOL) , so I would very much like to see an explanation and a good reason why this is happening.
Others Are Experiencing This as Well - Index Pages gone in MSN
The pattern on our site and the pattern I’ve seen reported on other sites are slightly different, though, as most seem to have lost their index page. Some have even gotten a message like this when doing a direct URL search on their index file:
We are seeing an increased volume of traffic by some malware software. In order to protect our customers from damage from that malware, we are blocking your query. A few legitimate queries may get flagged, and for that we apologize. Please be assured that we are hard at work on this problem and hope to get it resolved even better as soon as possible.
If you are using phpBB, please check out the phpBB downloads site *************** and make sure you are not vulnerable.
- MSN Search Team
As usual when things like this happens and nobody knows for sure what’s going on, people begin to speculate, trowing out wild conspiracy ideas such as “They obviously are deliberately dropping pages. It is obvious both because they crawl pages but still remove them from their index”
But what exactly, from a business perspective, would be the purpose of that?
I mean, isn’t it in MSN’s best interest to make sure that their “new” search engine, that they have spend billions of dollars developing, delivers the best possible results? To make people prefer their search engine over others by delivering better results?
They don’t even have their Ad Systems for MSN Search up yet (Microsoft adCenter Incubation Lab won’t have it up before June), so you can’t say they are doing this to make companies spend dollars on their paid listings either?
No offense, but think about it - there is, as far as I’m concerned, no logic behind statements like this.
SE Roundtable reported these problems on January 6 based on a post in Webmasterworld, although the discussions didn’t really ammount to any conclusions. And even though MSN put the pages back fairly quickly, it still hurts pretty bad some times.
Apparently, MSN’s Neural Network still have a lot to learn, but in the mean time, I know there must be many others out there experiencing the exact same problems, and I would really appreciate your opinion and personal experience on this!
Sverre Sjøthun
4 Comments so far
Leave a comment
hmm…they must’ve pulled some guys from the search department and displaced them to the xbox 360 assembly line.
By Michael Weir on 01.19.06 4:25 pm | Permalink
Well, after the reappearance of the NFL Lines page and the disappearance of the Online Poker page, we send yet another email to MSN, but we have yet so get any answer from them.
By Sverre Sjothun on 01.20.06 12:26 am | Permalink
I think MSN is following google steps, they are like newest and oldest site, and the amount of backlinks are important to MSN ranking algo.
By Jack Lee on 02.08.06 5:22 am | Permalink
We had a new client that dropped completely out of MSN for 3 weeks straight after doing a major overhaul on their inpage content. We were unable to find the site even by searching for the URL. Then suddenly it was right back at the top of the SERPs. Just hoping to pass on a little hope.
By AHFX on 04.05.06 11:21 pm | Permalink
RSS
TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
