Ok heres what is happening to me on MSN search. I made a new site about 3 weeks ago. When my site was first indexed by MSNbot it was always listed as "mydomain.com" and not "www.mydomain.com". My ranking for keywords was OK but not great. So MSN crawls my site again and i check a few days later to see if my ranking improved. Well I was pleasently suprised that my page was ranking in the top 10 for a few of my keyword phrases and were now listed under "www.mydomain.com" but my site was also duplicate listed as just "mydomain.com" without the www. Even thow these pages are identical theses pages listed without the www were ranked much lower and are often not the optimised pages for that phrase but usually related pages on my site. So MSN crawled my site again and i had made some tweaks so I checked to see how it was doing. Well every page that was listed as "www.mydomain.com" didnt even show up in the first 10 PAGES of any my keyword searches even thow days ago they were on the first page. My pages that are listed as just "mydomain.com" that rank poorly had all been updated and was cached recently from the day before. So i did a site search to see what happened to all my great ranking "www.mydomain.com" listings. It appears that all these pages for some reason or another that were all cached from the day before reverted to a super old cache from weeks ago that wasnt nearly as good. MSNbot has even re crawled my site but hasnt updated those pages yet. So basically when MSN crawled my site it updated all my crappy duplicate ranking listings and totally killed all my good ones and reverted them to an old cache copy. Not happy!
Hi Shredtone, What you need to do is use 301 redirects (or similar) from the pages you don't want indexed (i.e. "crappy duplicate ranking listings") to the pages you do want indexed. This should resolve the problem. Sam