Lost nearly all my pages on MSN/Live Search

[arch stanton]

dcz, I've just noticed that my site is getting no rankings from MSN/Live Search.

I've never had much traffic from MSN anyway so didn't regard it as a priority compared to Google. But my site had always come high in the rankings before.

But recently I noticed it wasn't coming up as high as other sites in the results for certain key searches, so I did a site search and it only lists 28 pages, most of which are not cached!

Of the rest, it only has the home page (last cached on 20 Aug 07), a couple of other static (i.e. non-forum) HTML pages, plus just one or two old links from my board on 30 Jul 07, i.e. the day that I switched over to phpbb3.

I hope this is the key to the problem and that the MSNbot has been following all the 301 redirects from zero dupe and soon everything will be cached again.

But I'm not so sure, as even the home page has lost ranking when it used to come top of the results on the most competitive keywords. So I'm concerned that something has gone very wrong, i.e. a ban or penalty of some sort from MSN. I can't see why, though, as I don't break any SEO rules.

[dcz]

MSN is really astonishing some times http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.gladtalk.co.uk

returns 28 links, but typing the site:www.gladtalk.co.uk commands does not list any page

You do not seem to have changes your topic url while converting, so I doubt that redirections could be the guilty one for this.

The main difference, beside XHTML code, could be the meta tags. You should install the dynamic meta tag mod anyway, and since they are more important to msn than to Google, it could help out.

It could as well explain why many cached pages do not have any description snippet in MSN listing.

++

[arch stanton]

Thanks dcz, could it also be due to a lack of sitemaps?

I never implemented GYM sitemaps on the old board, I was only using the old mx Google version. Of course I don't have any sitemaps at all now until the GYM module is ready for phpbb3...

I'm slightly wary of mega tags. When I originally installed them on my phpbb2 board a couple of years ago, Google didn't like it at all and dropped most of my pages.

[dcz]