I'm working on a site review for a client, and I was checking to see how well the site was indexed across the major search engines. Normally we do a site: command and skip to the last page of results to get as accurate a count as we can; however, MSN's count is a little puzzling. When I first performed a count, it said the client's site had 180 pages indexed (it's a brand new site). Jumping to the 10th page, however, changed the count to 100, and I couldn't see any results beyond page 10. Furthermore, when I tried to go back to previous pages, the count remained at 100. What happened to 180?
I'll use SEOmoz as an example. Searching for "site:seomoz.org" returns 94,500 results:
Once I go beyond the 100th page of results, however, I'm automatically taken to the 100th page, where it says "Page 100 of 1,000 results":
If I go back one page to 99, it changes again and says there are 94,400 results:
The counts are the same regardless of whether or not I'm logged into Live Search. Why severely neuter the results after a certain page? I can understand only showing 100 pages of results, but other search engines don't cut off the pages *and* drastically alter the count after a certain page. This is all very perplexing to me, as I haven't noticed this until now. Has anyone else experienced this with MSN?
MSN's site: command is Confusing Me...
Mobile
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Usually, the first search page gives you a guess/estimate of the number of pages that match a query. Going deeper in the search results gives more accurate result counts. That's why you shouldn't just take the initial results estimates as 100% accurate.
That's also why if you want to do index size estimates, it's helpful to do e.g. queries with rare words (< 1000 results) so that you can check the actual number of results instead just accepting the result estimates.
These comments apply to any major search engine, not just MSN.
Thanks, Matt - that's excellent insight into the issue and the operations. Greatly appreciated.
I've consistently had problems with MSN and have taken their site command results with a grain of salt in most occasions.
If a client was looking for a specific web address, you can use the "url:https://www.domain.com/page-information" command to verify if MSN has crawled and indexed the page or not.
However I know that that is a bit tedious (particularly if there are several pages you are looking for).
I actually thought I had heard or read something related to MSN deliberately not showing accurate results for site command queries, but I could not find the original reference (if indeed there was an actual reference)
Hi, I tried sooo hard to make a serious comment here, but the thing is I am drunk and you so much said...
"severly neuter"
Right when I read that I stopped being someone ready to investigate something serious, and became instead a curious 10 year old whos only goal was one thing...
"What?", I wondered. "Would the image search results look like for "severely neuter"?
How would different search engines tackle such a query?
Google:
has tons of images severely neuter
Yahoo:
has 2 images
severely neuter
MSN:
Is the most er, humane of the image searches as it has no results
severely neuter
Hope that helps, feel free to seek my wisdom always.
As always, Pat, you were extremely helpful...
Speaking of image searches, I had the sudden urge to do one for sarcasm (just kidding, Pat).
This happens on Google main search results, although it's hard to spot it because they cut you off at 1,000 and usually the results are in the millions. Once in a rare while, you'll get a count of less than 1,000, but if you cycle through them, the final count will be different. The total count ("1-10 of 47 Gajillion") isn't an exact calculation, but an approximation. Unfortunately, I can't find an example at the moment.
In this case, though, that looks to be a bug. Actually, I tried it and, when I jumped to Page 98 of search results, MSN gave me links to pages 95 - 103, but if I clicked on any page > 100, I got kicked back to page 100 and that was the highest linked results page.
Is there a reason why someone is thumbing down all of Rebecca's comments?
Don't lie, Tamar. We know it's you!
This is yet another testament as to why MSN is so far behind in search. If they ever want to be a serious competitor to Google (I think they can abandon all hope of ever catching or overtaking them), they need to fix errors like these.
I have a large site that has a lopsided number of pages in Yahoo (113,055) than I do in Google (2,050) and it's worse in MSN (92). Do I miss the traffic from MSN? No. According to Google Analytics, MSN is my 19th top referrer, worse than Google's Image Search from the Netherlands.
I know that everyone should make a true effort to get the best results from all the major search engines, but until MSN makes the effort to clean up their act, why should I bother with them?
Thanks Rebecca for the post! Since moving into SEO and reading your site daily it was helpful to have this issue pointed out here. Not enough time in the day to read everything, so I have a few sites that I find a must read.
Anyone ever tried to contact MSN for help with an indexing issue? It's like pulling teeth... without a tooth-puller. Automated responses, template answers, patronising responses geared at search newbies. I sent them an email about a country indexing problem, and knew that it was because of a country to IP mapping problem at their end. I pointed this out (I used to work in search quality for one of the 4 search engines) and indicated what they might do to solve the problem, so that perhaps this would speed up the solution. Still took them ages and an email exchange of about 8 iterations. Google fixed the problem in 2 weeks.
RedChair is right, until MSN work on the basics they'll never be serious competition. And don't even get me started on their algo and SERP quality...
Nate - with Live launching Webmaster Tools, you'll be able to do those interfaces more easily. I'll be posting an interview with someone from the Live search team here at SEOmoz and showing off some of those tools as well.
Well, one fix that they could do to improve my user experience is to stop the templated emails. It's really annoying.
I look forward to your interview Rand.
Rebecca: And that is not the only thing... actually the command link:seomoz.org is not working for me either: https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Awww.seomoz.org&go=Search&form=QBNO And I built the link command by using the Advanced search and not by typing directly.
I believe MSN disabled the link: command a few months back due to abuse
I'm not sure "abuse" is the right word, so much as demand. The folks at Live simple felt it was a big drain on resources.
Thanks Rebecca and Matt, you answered a question I didn't know I had to ask. So I learned on two fronts.
This same problem happens with Google too.
I am not sure whether anyone has noticed this before.
Ok, I have now spent a couple of hours trying to understand why I cannot get some information about backlinks for a certain domain.
I read all the posts about MSN dropping the link-command et al, and then a couple of sites stating that it is back online, now using a + sign, i.e. +link:domain.com which two months later (today)doesn't work for me either.
I've also seen MSN/Live's blog and new beta on Webmaster Tools.
What I just don't understand in this huge SEO-world is why I cannot find any clear comments on what is happening with msn.Perhaps this link-command is not as important as I thought?
What surprises me the most (well..) is the fact when I go to Live.com, click on 'advanced', then 'links to' and enter my domain name and eventually perform the search - it doesn't give me any results. Well, the query becomes 'link:www.google.com', which we established does not work.
But why the hell is it there??
MSN/Live is still one of the bigger search engines which has an advanced search function, but when using it, it tells me that no one in this world links to www.google.com? Jesus.
Sorry for a late post and somewhat off the topic, but this counts as the worst-spent evening/night so far in 2008.
Wow, surely we can top your worst night for you...can I send you some rancid meat or something? ;)
Well, it's only been 10 nights so far this year, more chances to come for competition on the hot list.Nah, at 2 am in Sweden I'll pass on the meat ;)
I just found another post on another site experiencing the same problem a few days before christmas. Just a bit surprised no one else has written anybody about it?Feel like I am the only one wanting to use the link:domain-function on MSN, and that sure is a lonely feeling!Thanks.
When i checked my site in MSN at that time i found that 19 pages are indexed in MSN. But Total Pages of my website is 12. I found that MSN showing some pages of my website 2 Times.
Nothing new here really, just another proof that MSN / Live / whatever they call it is constantly broken hahaha
Absolutely, I had the same experience checking results in MSN last week; results would change as i navigated through the results.
just started reading this site, but i assume you must be new to seo or at least using these features in msn as this issue with has been ongoing for well over a year now, probably closer to 2 years (since they introduced "live". as far as the link issue that was decommissioned at least 6 months ago probably a little more in all honesty.
The link: operator was stopped in March of this year. MSN stated that it was due to a lot of scraping issues they were seeing. I wish I could remember where the official information was posted by them.
As for the site: operator, that's been happening for a long time as well. I think you're right that it was since live came out.
MSN Live Search Blog
sorry...March, 28
I'm not new to SEO, I've just never noticed this happen with MSN before.
sorry, no offense meant, it's just something that i thought was common knowledge. across our client load we check this sort of stuff quite frequently and have found msn to be the least reliable with these results
Same here, but we nonetheless provide counts from all four search engines in our site reviews for our clients. Admittedly, it's been a while since I've done a site review, but the last time I did one (over the summer) I didn't notice this happening with MSN. Sorry if it's old news, it's just new to me.
Ditto
(meant as subcomment for rebeccas comment "I'm not new to SEO, I've just never noticed this happen with MSN before." Dont knwo how it ended up down here ;) )
If you're not new to SEO then how do you account for that terrible score on the SEOMoz quiz. Admit it, you don't even know what seo stands for!
One of the troubles here is that MSN/Live said they'd be fixing these issues in the new release a couple weeks back (Searchification). Definitely a frustrating issue to deal with.
I find that an inurl: search tends to give better results than the site: command which is optimised for speed. I don't think this works too well for MSN but certainly for Google it seems to give much more accurate results.
Yea, Why doesn't Bill Gates just spend the money man, and fix these things,
I am always surprised how much money that guy hasd but the worst search engine ever
Actually, the new Live engine is pretty sweet. It's taken over from Google as my main engine
Not to mention operating system and animated Office friends....