Comments on: Getting Into MS Live Should Not Be This Hard

By: New York SEO

New York SEO — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:39:19 +0000

That’s awesome you figured it out. I just wrote about that here; http://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

By: Computer Forum

Computer Forum — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:18:33 +0000

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.

By: Canadian SEO

Canadian SEO — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:49:22 +0000

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.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 16:08:00 +0000

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.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 16:02:45 +0000

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.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:37:48 +0000

Hello there, this is very good for SEO and searching: http://www.PolyCola.com (Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Altavista…)

By: Marko

Marko — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:27:18 +0000

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.

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:22:12 +0000

I know, it’s pretty ridiculous…

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:02:51 +0000

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.