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I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 4 months 2 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

Am I the only person that didn’t know this? I just “accidentally” discovered that an entire website wasn’t ranked for ANYTHING in MSN. They had #1 ranking for the primary phrase in Google and Yahoo, yet could not be found anywhere in the top 200 results on MSN. After scrolling through 5 pages of SERPS, I guessed that it just wasn’t in the index, but I was wrong…

It was in the index alright, but only one page for the domain name, which was 301 redirected at the root. When I did a site search in Live, I was greeted with just one page, and when I hit the “cached page” this is what I saw:

301.jpg

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page. How dumb is that? Is this just common knowledge among SEO’s that I somehow missed?

I’m not here to debate the wisdom of redirecting the main page in the first place, but my point is that if the site owner decides to, for whatever reason, the bots should follow, and the majority (Google, Yahoo, Ask etc.) do just fine.

How to solve this dilemma? Well I’ll have to get to that in another post, (because I’ll have to figure it out) but for now I have a question…

Why does Microsoft bot not follow 301’s? Is it an inherent technical inability to do so, or is it actually a conscious decision? It REALLY seems stupid to me…

*Update next morning –

I’m out of town all week, working from a laptop / cell phone connection, and things are painfully slow, but here’s that I’ve found out so far…

1. This is not a new problem, and others have seen it before, going back all the way to 2004.
2. In 2005 someone else noticed it, but nobody even responded.
3. Nearly 2 years later,  it was still unresolved, and now, 3 years later it’s still not.

I wish I would’ve known this before I changed my permalinks last week, since now ALL 250+ of my blog pages will likely drop completely out of MSN / Live / Microsoft, or whatever we’re supposed to call them….

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