Live search seems to be throwing some curved balls in the indexing stakes. Whilst trying to get a site indexed, msnbot doesn’t seem to want to know. All other major players have listed weeks ago - Google, Yahoo, UK Ask all list the site, and it is nicely climbing up their rankings for chosen keywords.
The sitemap has been added, site authenticated, site has original content (no “dodgy” content), all other guidelines followed, Live webmaster console is even showing backlinks & outbound links – but no listing on the index.
This doen’t seem to be an isolated incident either – on searching the forum, trying to find answers, it seems that many people are experiencing the same problem – one of the admins seems to have more success in adding sites, (apparently using the same tool that is available to everyone – work that one out) but surely we should not have to go through this just to get a listing
The mysteries of Search Engine workings are well documented, and a whole industry emerged in the last few years around it – however, this has generally been around improving your ranking – not getting the site listed in the first place, a simple submit usually does the trick. However, things have got a little more complicated with the advent of webmaster tools, XML sitemaps, authentication, but not beyond the grasp of anyone with a basic understanding of web design or SEO.
Problems with ranking are one thing – every search engine works to its own algorithms so differing results are to be expected, if I rank badly with one engine, steps can be take to try and remedy the situation, but to not get listed when there is no obvious reason does not reflect well on Live – no wonder they are still relatively a small player in the industry. At this rate Google doesn’t have much to worry about anytime soon.
