How hard should it be to get a site spidered and into Microsoft search index for a site that’s over 3 years old, and has been in Google and Yahoo for years?
Even if they won’t follow my 301 redirect, don’t you think that submitting an XML site map at Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Tools would do the trick?
The problem is that there’s a 301 redirect from the main domain pointing to a subdirectory and admittedly, that’s not the best way a site should be set up, but that’s the way it was done, and Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. seem to have no problem with it.
Well the 301 doesn’t work, and submitting a sitemap won’t even show that it’s validated. Instead it just says “No Data Available”.
A little history –
In November I posted that Microsoft Search is not following 301 redirects, and now nearly a month later, the site in question is still not in their index despite my reasonable efforts. This is not a client domain, and not worth hours of my time, but I’ve done all that SHOULD be necessary, in my opinion.
To recap what’s been done so far:
On the day I discovered the 301 problem, I placed the path to my XML site map in the robots.txt file, which is the generally accepted method to tell engines where to look for the XML sitemap.
(There are also some inbound links to deep pages on the site in question from other sites that are in the Microsoft index, in case anyone Is wondering.)
Then, a couple of weeks ago, guessing that maybe it wasn’t catching robots.txt either, I submitted the XML site map to Microsoft Webmaster center, and verified the site through the meta tag method. Still, their cache date is showing as November 22, and nothing’s in the index for that domain except the Apache 301 page.
So, my question for Microsoft is… What the heck is going on?
Why should someone have to work this hard to get a site visited and indexed, and why can’t you fix it? Don’t you want us to care about your search engine?
I think the 301 problem, and how we should work around it, could and should be addressed on the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Central Blog. Anyone disagree?
Scott Hendison is the CEO of Search Commander, Inc. and a recovering affiliate marketer. He is also one of the founding board members of SEMpdx. Find out more about him at his website, SearchCommander.com.
My first reaction is lol..but it’s really not funny. That’s pretty damn crappy…I thought you were going to say a 2 week old site or 2 month but 3 years!..no idea why the 301 redirect wouldn’t work.
I know, it’s pretty ridiculous…
I’ve had the same problem with a clients site. I had to email MSN and ask them why it was missing and then 3 days later it appeared in the SERP but I never got an explanation of why it was originally missing.
Hello there, this is very good for SEO and searching: http://www.PolyCola.com (Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Altavista…)
I’ve had Microsoft chasing down a similar problem for me, and they say that if you use 302 redirects, you’ll be in happy-land with MSN. Problem is that if you use 302s, you’ll get duplicate content in Yahoo and Google.
My verdict: live with it, and stick with 301s. Microsoft will either figure it out eventually or not. If not, what they have really isn’t a search engine, it’s a pile of crap. Even on my sites that were built from scratch and thus have no need for redirects and MSN is indexing them fine and I’ve verified that the search results for commonly-used keywords have us listed first, MSN provides only a microscopic fraction of the traffic–between 4 and 10 percent.
I should add that on the site I’m currently pulling my hair out over, even though Google is taking a coon’s age to index my content-rich pages (It has done a swell job of indexing stupid pages like the privacy policy and the login page), it still serves up the vast majority of the traffic from search engines. Like on the order of 95%. Though Yahoo managed to get it’s brains sorted out in the last week or so and has about 90% of the content indexed, so I imagine those numbers will change somewhat.
I’ve always found Live to be an odd beast, but what do you expect from a search engine that doesn’t properly handle 301 redirects. Its also one of the weirdest ones to rank on. I’ve seen clients rock it, and clients it doesn’t like it at where Google will give them all top 10s.
I was so excited when Microsoft announced the Webmaster center. But after setting up all my websites with good sitemaps nothing much is happening in Live. Yeah I’m using a 301 plugin for SEOing my forums. May be this post will answer my questions. 🙂
That’s awesome you figured it out. I just wrote about that here; https://jameseo.com/microsoft-seo-from-them-themselves/
It doesn’t have to be hard at all. In fact MSN says it plain and clear in their SEO Best practices pdf;
“1. Sitemaps – Let the search engines know about all of the URLs on site by creating an XML sitemap and referencing it in your robost.txt file.”
Looks like you still figured this out some time ago and even though you learned it hard way, I’m sure you’ve learned more through this experience than I did by just reading the doc.
Good post and troubleshooting 😉
New York SEOs last blog post..Microsoft SEO – From Them Themselves