15 replies to this topic

[Gary Bagshawe]

Hiya all, am I bieng paranoid or have some major Keep the Faith When the [url=http://searchengineland.com/070621-145956.php]Keep the Faith When the Algo Changes[/url] recently occured at msn.com? For at least 2 sites (that I have checked so far) Pages that were indexed for certain keyword phrases have dropped from p#2 to p#72 and another from p#9 to p#97. As you can imagine my customers are not very happy. Is anybody aware of any major changes or no of similar incidents. I use the ineedhits pfi service. They say that they have had a few problems recently but all should be fine now.

[MakeMeTop]

There has been a major algo change on Inktomi in the last 36 hours. Not to the better as far as I can see!

You are not alone in seeing huge drops - I've sunk from being in the top 20 for several years to in the lower 90s for my own site.

And after all the nice PR I've given to INK

Give it a few days and see if things re-shuffle. I can't see the results staying as they are - I've got some really bizarre results to come up for some listings!

[powerofeyes]

Hello,

There has been a major algo change on Inktomi in the last 36 hours.

I feel this is true. There is a mass indexing going on in couple of my clients sites by inktomi search. Inktomi spider has been indexing one of my client's ecommerce site for the past 5 hours. i dont know what it is doing there all the time. But this site has 20,000 items so may be it is indexing the whole sites. I dont know. But I am monitoring the site for the past 5 to 6 hours.
I have the same experience with couple of my client's sites. But to my good luck some of my clients sites which didnt show up in rankings are now coming up in the top rankings. And to my surprise these sites have very high link popularity but no proper optimization. I cant understand what kind of algo change is that,
thanks,
VIJAY.

[Gary Bagshawe]

I have delved further and discovered that the drops have only occured on msn.com and not msn.co.uk, Don't know if this helps at all.

[chino]

International MSN.com (India and UK) are fine, hotbot results have been affected as well... Seems blueyonder.com and about.com and poistiontech's search have not...

I did keyword density comparision to the top 30 of a listing I was #15 before the shuffle and my site beats them considerably, also link pop doesn't really seem to be a factor found sites in the 50's with more links than those on the 1st page...

Anyone heard if MSN is beta testing their search database? I figure if looksmart is gone in mid-january so will inktomi from their results...

[Jill]

Welcome, Chino!

Jill

[torka]

I just happened to be reading Danny Sullivan's Search Day newsletter when I dropped in on this thread, and according to today's article, Ink will be around on MSN for awhile still (not dropping in January like LS) because MSN's crawler isn't quite ready for prime time yet.

Ink's contract runs until Dec. 2005, but MSN will prolly drop them before that, according to the article.

--Torka "I knew being able to mutiltask would come in handy someday"

[MakeMeTop]

Geotargetting has kicked in big time on MSN and HotBot.

Example:

I rank in the hundreds for "search engine marketing" on MSN.com and Hotbot.com. I rank #1 out of 1.7 million sites on MSN.co.uk and Hotbot.co.uk worldwide searches (INK results).

Same holds true on many other pages I have checked - out of site on the .coms and at the top on the regional variations. Except for my .com domains - where the opposite has happened.

[chino]

Here's something to ponder...

My coworker's blog has a link to one of my sites, his blog ranks higher on MSN US for the main keyword phrase than my site even though the only occurence of the key word phrase is the link to my site...

As far as geotargeting, i don't know... my sites rank highly on MSN India and MSN New Zealand but now rank horribly on MSN US... All US hosted with US searches...

Also, MarketLeap inclusion has not been affected (yet), the sites I have included into Inktomi through them are still just fine... The ones I've included through PositionTech, INeedHits, LycosInSight, and NetworkSolutions have dropped...

Also, sites that have been included into MSN w/o using Inktomi PI have fallen considerably also, so it doesn't appear to be just an Inktomi situation...

[projectphp]

Seeing the same in the Australian results

Typical of Inktomi. Don't ask, like Google does, if you want all results or just Australian, just go ahead and give me Australian results, and not based upon my IP, but where I search. Man, they are so hopeless!!!

Again, Google shows how to do it the right way, yet everyone else gets it wrong.

Edited by projectphp, 07 October 2003 - 08:00 PM.

[MakeMeTop]

In fairness to INK - pure INK searches on PT are not geo-targetted. I'm #4 for "search engine marketing" there.

It is the partners that are turning on the geo-targetting knob, although INK have made it available to them.

I assume that this is all part of INK becoming the main-stream result provider on MSN. Geo-targetting has been in place to a lesser extent for a some time, but results were sensibly balanced. A popular .com site would show up on UK results and overcome the regional bias. Tests on MSN UK led them to believe these results (without L$) were more relevant - so they have turned the knob up to make them more relevant (in their eyes)?

I'm not sure how this works in the US, but there is (allegedly) regional geo-targetting there which is available - based on surfer/ISP location. Certainly some .com results are way out of sync with pure INK too.

[ralent]

Gary .... I found your post doing a search for "huge drop on Inktomi". I use Lycos InSite for PI and my site has dropped for every keyword I optimized for.

Where I was getting 40-50 visits a day from MSN I now get none. One keyword dropped from #2 to #337. This happened on October 1st. The only change I made to the site (about 60 pages) was to rename one page.

[Jill]

Welcome, ralent!

Jill

[ralent]

Thanks Jill ... this looks like a great board!

Well, for what it's worth my rankings still hold on Pure Inktomi (as presented by Position Tech).

It looks like MSN (US) and Hotbot is pretty much using Inktomi for "Web Pages" with a few sites filtered out here and there. Other than that it is the same line by line.

[Greystar]

Most odd.

msn.co.uk appears to have dropped the Looksmart Uk directory listings, which now seem to be showing up within the Ink results on webpage matches...

I know Looksmart was supposed be be out as of Jan 2004, but is seems that .co.uk has jumped the gun a little!!