View Full Version : Not Results in MSN
incrediblehelp
02-27-2006, 11:03 AM
Hello everyone,
I usually never ask for advice on these types of projects, but this one has stumped me a little. Usually I am first one to find what websites are doing wrong or why a particular website has "pissed" off a search engine. One website
coleparmer.com
I recently started working on is having issues with showing up in MSN. Now as everyone knows it is pretty dang easy to show up in MSN search as long has you have the core on-site SEO techniques in place and not trying to spam. For some reason this website is not ranking most of their catalog items:
http://www.coleparmer.com/catalog/Catalog_toc.asp
I mean even if you copy their title word for word they don't show up. Now understand that this project is pretty new to me and much work needs to be done, so I am not looking for an on-site SEO advice. I have a plan in place for this, but I wondering if any of you sharp SEOers out there can spot some possible demotion happening or maybe some past mistakes that CP could have done to turn off MSNbot.
Help or advice is appreciated
ctabuk
02-27-2006, 11:32 AM
7,016 MSN BL's including your own blog. Is it for the search term Lab Supplies?
incrediblehelp
02-27-2006, 11:51 AM
I have been specifically working on the catalog area of the website:
http://www.coleparmer.com/catalog/Catalog_toc.asp
Now I know I found a bunch of duplicate content that I have either deleted or 301 redirected to the original page and it could be influencing the fact that they don't rank for anything, but all this was fixed a while ago and MSN is very quick at updating. Once again I am seeing pages indexed just not ranking for even the most specific queries.
Another issue is I feel the spidering activity for MSNbot on the website is not that great. For most other websites I track I see MSNbot as the 1-2-3 most active bot on the website and for coleparmer.com it is not even in the top 10.
ctabuk it is not for a specific term, just overall performance.
rocky1
02-27-2006, 06:07 PM
Best Guess by SWAEG Method (Scientific Wild @ss Educated Guess)....
I'd give it to lack of real page content Incredihelp. If you look at the pages in Lynx Browser (text only view) there really isn't a great deal of real content on them. Likewise, the top half of the page remains constant on every page which might be throwing them off too, but not highly likely.
Take a peek at the site on the viewer here, I think you'll see what I mean - http://www.instantposition.com/search-engine-viewer.cfm
The homepage has a whole 4 lines of real content on it, that's the extent of it. Otherwise the content is broken, full of links and page code, and just essentially meaningless. It's not "real" content, it's not a dialogue. Your catalog pages are as a rule fairly short too, (or at least all of them I found were), listing only 2 - 3 pages; again very limited content.
MSN loves content! I've opened enough sites page 1 there of late, I can guarantee it. That's an easy one to test, toss 3 - 4 lengthy paragraphs of keyword laced content on the bottom of the homepage out of the way, resubmit to MSN, give it a week, and see what it does. As a rule if you submit or suggest a URL for inclusion through their "How Can We Improve?" search suggestion form, it will be crawled in a matter of days. You should see results inside of a week if that's it.
rocky1
02-27-2006, 06:45 PM
Best Guess by SWAEG Method (Scientific Wild @ss Educated Guess)....
I'd give it to lack of real page content Incredihelp. If you look at the pages in Lynx Browser (text only view) there really isn't a great deal of real content on them. Likewise, the top half of the page remains constant on every page which might be throwing them off too, but not highly likely.
Take a peek at the site on the viewer here, I think you'll see what I mean - http://www.instantposition.com/search-engine-viewer.cfm
The homepage has a whole 4 lines of real content on it, that's the extent of it. Otherwise the content is broken, full of links and page code, and just essentially meaningless. It's not "real" content, it's not a dialogue. Your catalog pages are as a rule fairly short too, (or at least all of them I found were), listing only 2 - 3 pages; again very limited content.
MSN loves content! I've opened enough sites page 1 there of late, I can guarantee it. That's an easy one to test, toss 3 - 4 lengthy paragraphs of keyword laced content on the bottom of the homepage out of the way, resubmit to MSN, give it a week, and see what it does. As a rule if you submit or suggest a URL for inclusion through their "How Can We Improve?" search suggestion form, it will be crawled in a matter of days. You should see results inside of a week if that's it.
Start by cleaning up the code! You have two heads, no doctype, no charset and 791 errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.coleparmer.com%2Fcatalog%2FCa talog_toc.asp).
incrediblehelp
02-27-2006, 07:27 PM
Yeah as you know when dealing with clients you very limited in coding changes, especially those that deal with just cleaning of the code. I have recommended many code clean-ups with them.
incrediblehelp
02-27-2006, 07:42 PM
Another FYI on these catalog pages. The only thing we have done is clean up some major linking architecture issues throughout the website. We are in the process of updating title tags and adding solid content to each page now.
I have gotten a few emails and PM to this effect and I just wanted to agree with everyone these pages are in no way completely optimized.
I am sure that optimizing them will help in MSN over the next few weeks.
I was asking everyone more on if they saw any reason for demotion rather than the lack of optimization on the pages?
DrTandem1
02-27-2006, 08:33 PM
Tell me, I'm not that sure about active service pages. Being dynamic, is it difficult for the content to be indexed?
incrediblehelp
02-27-2006, 08:38 PM
Nope indexing the pages in ASP form is not an issue what-so-ever.
Actually one of the link architecture changes we did was limiting the number of tracking variables they had in the URL string. Some of there URLs have 4-5 variables/parameters in them. Not ideal at all. We cut all most all pages down to 1-2.
I jsut used the term 'Aseptic Sampling System' and it came up 3rd place, first page in MSN: www.coleparmer.com/catalog/product_list.asp?cls=42400&sch=969
So I would just give it some time.
I can relate to teh code changes and trying to get your client to do them...good luck!
incrediblehelp
02-28-2006, 12:47 PM
Yeah I really think it had to do with the linking architecture (which is now fixed). Also once these catalog pages are optimized fully I expect to see a nice boost in the rankings.
randy776
02-28-2006, 01:47 PM
We had a similar problem a while back in that we were at the top of the searches in Google and Yahoo for almost all of our search terms, we were getting several million uniques a month from those two search engines, so obviously our SEO tactics were acceptable. We had been online since 2000 and were well represented all through the beta testing of MSN. Then suddenly when the new search went live we were gone, not just poor results, but GONE!
We spent the next several weeks (months) communicating with MSN via email and on the phone, to no avail. They kept going back to the standard response of telling me he how to submit, to be patient, etc. But we already had thousands of backlinks and no pages listed!
Long story short...through a hosting issue we were forced to change IP numbers.....the next day, all of our pages (over 10,000)
........were ALL in the MSN serps.
Apparently the IP number was blacklisted or blocked from MSN, but apparently no one in their support structure knew it.
scot184
02-28-2006, 04:02 PM
I got the "no doc type error" on WC3...what should it be? Does anyone have the correct code so I can add it.
Thanks.
jacobwissler
03-01-2006, 03:23 AM
MSN pays more attention to W3C validation than other search engines, and they focus on "on page factors" more than links. Quality pages often do well on MSN, even with few links, as compared to Google, which seems to focus mostly upon the number and quality of IBL.
I like the MSN program. Many of the great authors in all of human history were not very popular in their day. The validity of an idea is not determed by the number of people who agree with it, or link to it. Many great scientists were considered kooks when they first published their theory (can you imagine telling a person in 1900 that men would walk on the moon within his lifetime).
A porno site will always have more IBL that a scientific thesis that has yet to be proven.
Burf.com
03-01-2006, 08:24 AM
Very interesting post, I was always wanted to know what engines rated w3c. Do you have any good links to the msn program you refer to?
I seem to be 7th on there for one of my main keywords.
Just a test reply, nothing to see here... move along.
reply test 2.
these will be deleted momentarily....
scanmonkey
03-07-2006, 10:06 PM
Could you put the javascript menu in an external .js file.
I've read somewhere that the bot will stop indexing after a certain amount of words it can not find any content.
scanmonkey
03-07-2006, 10:15 PM
Just noticed this link to content ratio theory for msn mentioned by dburdon
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=59643
Would that have an effect on MSN?
incrediblehelp
03-09-2006, 04:06 AM
scan,
Yes I spotted that as well and if were true that would be a huge problem for the top level pages on this website, but the product pages themsleves have decent content without as many links.
kikkertm
03-11-2006, 09:52 AM
I also have interest in this topic (I started the thread http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=59643 ) although I'm not convinced it is related completely to this post. I also noticed the "content to link" remark in that post but I'm slightly suprised as i think the homepage mentioned is actually quite content (and keyword) rich. It was the case though that there were quite some 'off-domain' links (pointing to the secure pages of the reseller) which I now replaced with domain internal links.
MSN pays more attention to W3C validation than other search engines, and they focus on "on page factors" more than links. Quality pages often do well on MSN, even with few links, as compared to Google, which seems to focus mostly upon the number and quality of IBL.
My tests have shown the exact opposite (at least with sites related to mine). MOST pages I found in the top results did not validate, used NO doctype and still relied on "old" technologies (layout with tables instead of CSS etc..). The site mentioned in the post passes validation as XHTML and still those pages fell out of the index. The only pages still in MSN are the web-site-template pages which are template monster created (so not exactly unique content) using tables and loads of javascript document.writes! Not my definition of quality pages. I wonder how jacobwissler came to his "Quality" statement.