Missing Pages on Live/MSN

At the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association (SFIMA) event “Friends Don’t Let Friends Waste Search Engine Advertising,” I had an opportunity to speak to Martin Gilliard from MSN about a recent concern that’s been talked about on the SEO boards. Since MSN implemented their new search engine, Live.com, many website owners are noticing that pages that were previously in MSN.com’s old search tool are now missing, and more importantly so is traffic that came with them.

Martin admitted that during the transition, it’s possible that some of the pages that were previously indexed may have gotten lost in the switch over. So let out that breath you’ve been holding and shelve the MSN conspiracy theories. According to our friendly neighborhood MSN representative, the missing pages were not dropped on purpose.

So how do you fix this problem and get your MSN/Live traffic back?

Go to MarketLeap’s Search Engine Saturation tool and see how many pages are currently indexed in the search engines, specifically MSN. Then click on the trending report and see if there have been a dramatic change in the last few months in the number of pages indexed in MSN.

If everything is the same, relax, you missed the bullet and can stop reading this post. If the number has dropped dramatically, then you need to do a few simple tasks to get into Live.com’s new index. First, create a XML sitemap of your existing site. If you don’t know how, check out the easy-to-read instructions at Sitemaps.org. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all support the protocol detailed on this site so you’ll be helping not only your chances to get indexed by Live.com but also Google and Yahoo.

Then submit your site to Live.com. It might take a little bit for Live’s spiders to come back and crawl your site, so don’t panic if you don’t immediately see all your pages back in Live.com.

If you need assistance setting up sitemaps for your site or need additional search engine optimization advice on MSN/Live, please contact Ten Golden Rules at 561-620-9121 or blog at tengoldenrules.com.