I have a good strong site which is ranked #1 and #2 in G and #2 in Y for its main keywords, it is by far the biggest and most authorative site about the topic out on the web. Live search does not have a single page indexed... so I went through their support channel and finally got human answers in stead of the usual first line support copy paste stuff... Now the reply I got confused me a lot... Implementing the first suggestion would effectively ban all other search engines... Nice one Microsoft... So I implemented option #2 But that should really not be necessary right? I mean robots.txt is to BLOCK bots, not to invite them, so any bot not blocked is already invited in to the site... This Microsoft support reply just does not make sense to me... Any suggestions? The site is the Dumaguete site in my signature...
In your position I would probably probably thank god for ranking well for the search engines that matter and not worry about the 1-5% extra that MSN could provide. There are easier ways to grow traffic by that much... I submitted a sitemap at http://webmaster.live.com/ about 6 weeks ago and managed to get my 3 yr old sites homepage indexed. No traffic tho...
I am very happy about my rankings on the big search engines, but I still wonder what goes wrong with Microsofts search engine And I found it interesting that their specialist is trying to get me to ban all other search engines from my site...
The same problem is with me. I emailed microsoft about it and they said that their bot does not understand gzip! lol...thats hilarious!
I emailed Microsoft back asking why they would want me to ban all other bots... Reply - yes example number 1 only allows MSNBOT.... I am certainly happy I did a little research of my own too in stead of taking the advice of the MSN "specialist" I know I should not care that much about the 1,7 visitors MSN would send per year.... But it just annoys me to no end that these people can't get their search engine to work
I fail to see how MIcrosoft can expect to be regarded as a serious search engine when no-one uses it. I have a site that has consistently ranked in first place in Google and Microsoft for relevant search terms and yet Live.com only refers 1% of the traffic that Google does. In doesn't take a genius to work out which search engine my visitors use. In fact, looking at my site stats 90% of visitors used Google, leaving the remaining 10% split between all other Search engines. I did used to spend a large amount of time trying to optimise for all Search engines, but there seemed to be little or no point. Now I concentrate solely on Google and will continue to do so until something dramatically changes.