Getting Into MS Live Should Not Be This Hard
How hard should it be to get a site spidered and into Microsoft search index for a site that’s over 3 years old, and has been in Google and Yahoo for years?
Even if they won’t follow my 301 redirect, don’t you think that submitting an XML site map at Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Tools would do the trick?
The problem is that there’s a 301 redirect from the main domain pointing to a subdirectory and admittedly, that’s not the best way a site should be set up, but that’s the way it was done, and Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. seem to have no problem with it.
Well the 301 doesn’t work, and submitting a sitemap won’t even show that it’s validated. Instead it just says “No Data Available”.
A little history –
In November I posted that Microsoft Search is not following 301 redirects, and now nearly a month later, the site in question is still not in their index despite my reasonable efforts. This is not a client domain, and not worth hours of my time, but I’ve done all that SHOULD be necessary, in my opinion.
To recap what’s been done so far:
On the day I discovered the 301 problem, I placed the path to my XML site map in the robots.txt file, which is the generally accepted method to tell engines where to look for the XML sitemap.
(There are also some inbound links to deep pages on the site in question from other sites that are in the Microsoft index, in case anyone Is wondering.)
Then, a couple of weeks ago, guessing that maybe it wasn’t catching robots.txt either, I submitted the XML site map to Microsoft Webmaster center, and verified the site through the meta tag method. Still, their cache date is showing as November 22, and nothing’s in the index for that domain except the Apache 301 page.
So, my question for Microsoft is… What the heck is going on?
Why should someone have to work this hard to get a site visited and indexed, and why can’t you fix it? Don’t you want us to care about your search engine?
I think the 301 problem, and how we should work around it, could and should be addressed on the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Central Blog. Anyone disagree?
