Don't touch anything right now. If you just made those few changes and msn hasn't indexed them and considering that you were enjoying fairly good rankings prior to those minor changes, revert back right now. MSN is the most sensitive search engine to page changes. Even a small change like a few additional alt tags can make a huge difference in it. Let msn become more stable in a few weeks then put your seo skills to work.
Yeah I ended up reverting back for the time being. The pages in question hadn't had the new changes indexed yet it seems. So I am going to slide it back just to be safe... And wait and see how things shake out.
MSN has now dropped my site from #1 to no man's land. The strange thing is that it's only showing 9 results in a niche that had millions yesterday. Here's to hoping things settle down.
for me it seems like sites with automatic link exchanges had dropped, while those with natural links are still on top
wellll the site that i'm watching closely didn't lose too many spots. I can get it back to where it was in a few weeks i'm sure (maybe sooner)
like i said, now is not the right time to tamper with your pages. msn is still very unstable and will make your efforts go in vain. I've gained my top ranking again but a few hours later it's coming to #2 or #3 again so i'll definitely be stupid to try to optimize it. Optimize it based on what? An unstable algo?
There's changes every hour or so. MSN is by far becoming the most useless search engine ever! Since late July, MSN has been crawling average 10GB/month on one of my main datafeed sites and yet it's only displaying 150 pages on a site: operator for all those months. I sure hope it's not using the same crawling mechanism as the dumbest yet most publicised search engine in history - ask jeeves
This has been my experience also. Countless times I've seen serps bounce around, though it's usually only for a couple of days. I do agree with webmistress here - let it settle so you can work on known quantities. I'm seeing behaviour that is (theoretically) too weird to be permanent - not to mention the total disparity between geotargetted SERPS. I really don't think this is going to be permanent - but I don't have a line on MSN so unfortunately, it's wait and see Cheers, JL
Latest Update: My # of pages in MSN index have just increased by a factor of 8 for most of my sites! Amost all 3-4 levels deep pages indexed so far! They do not appear on the serps at this time though but that's very good news. Been waiting for more than 3 months for this to happen Anyone else experience this?
Yeah I have seen an increase in index for some of my sites... Mostly those which disappeared and remain out of the rankings. I have a site that ranks #1 for several keywords in MSN and it remains there but now has about 1/3 the number of pages indexed.
For years my site has been on the first page of MSN for a certain keyword. And, for about a year it's been ranked #1. Now, the site is placed on the 5th page and I'm not getting any traffic from it now. I have not made changes to the home page in months. So, I'm not sure why the ranking has changed. It's got to be an alog change or a penalty. I just checked and found out the same thing happened to several of my keywords. Uugh. I see other people are experiencing a drop also.