MSN Live Search is a Joke...

As a lot of my friends know I geek out about this whole internet thing and recently have been perfecting the search engine optimization for my websites.

One site that I have been working on was actually designed by someone else. I just do the monthly house keeping on it. The owner of the site was concerned about how certain keywords weren't bringing her site up in MSN's Live Search results which is her preferred search tool. **Let me interrupt here and say that I've never used MSN search, I've almost always relied on Google.** Well, after a little hesitation I agreed to see what I can do to fix the problem, after all I bill hourly so what's the problem...

So after a short little search I find a place that you can submit a site to Live Search and of course you would think that would do something... after submitting it and watching the site logs for about a week I saw no hits from the MSNBot crawling the site. So a I did some tidy work to the Keywords and page content to see if that helped any but nothing...

Finally I came across this link at the bottom of the Live Search page that says "For Webmasters" I clicked the link and followed the instructions of setting up a tool that is supposed to help improve your site listing with Live. And you know, after a week or more you would expect that something would happen but nothing did. Which shocked me because of course I was comparing everything to Google and how fast a site gets indexed by them. Well after looking through the links inside the webmaster's tools site I noticed some information that wasn't there before. It indicated that the last crawl to the site was back in November 2007, yes... over two months ago and when it crawled it only indexed one page. This was frustrating, so I submitted the url and a new sitemap and waited a few days, still nothing.

Well after not knowing what else to do I continued searching the internet for help with this thinking that maybe I had done something wrong until today. I found a forum hosted on Microsoft's website specifically regarding MSNBot and the webmaster tool I have been using and the first page of forum topics nearly every single post was someone having the same problem that I have been experiencing. Checking in most of the threads for an answer to to this problem it turns out that NO ONE knows what's wrong with it and there has been no official response from Microsoft about it, at least none that I can find. Go Microsoft, yet another successful waste of corporate money! It's as if there is no real logic to what sites it indexes and what sites it excludes, all I know is that I'm not the only one who can't get them to index this site.

As a result, I emailed my client explaining this situation and notified her that I will no longer optimize for Live Search. I also suggested that she start using a different search tool like Google or Yahoo... which is the whole point of this post today, to tell all you people out there in internet land to STOP USING LIVE SEARCH! It sucks!

Please use Google or even Yahoo but for the love of Peter Paul and some guy named Mike NOT LIVE.