#1 But (Sort of) Unhappy

I've been #1 in MSN results for the past 6 months for keywords "wooden propeller", and the results have always shown the title of the page and the description. Although it's still #1, the title is now the URL and the description is missing.

My site is informational only, and I suppose it's no big deal, but can someone explain why the results have shifted this way? Keep in mind that I am a complete amateur at this, but have enjoyed #1 SERP on all the major search engines after listening to advice on this forum, so thanks for past help and any recommendations.

Dave

I guess the logical first question would be have you changed anything on your site? Are your <Title> and <Meta name= Description> tags still there?

It wasn't OeeBali who changed something (i would guess). It was MSN that stopped using Inktomi and starting using their own, home grown search technology.

OeeBali - try tweaking the meta description and page copy a bit.

Maybe your site was down for a brief moment when the MSN bot came to index your site (just a though.). If so, It should get corrected the next time it comes around.

I haven't changed anything in months, and what little changes I've made over time have never seemed to effect the listing. It's also stayed the same in all of the other search engines and has been very stable (#1 on Google for nearly a year).

Try reposting your index page....i know that works sometimes.....or check with your hosting service to see if it has anything to do with something on that end.....good luck

I had a similar problem recently. A couple of my pages lost their title and snippet, and worse: some of my robots.txt-disallowed pages turned up. Of course I used the "feedback link" (to comment on the latter problem especially). Still, it remained like that for weeks.

I still have "untitled" pages now (dunno if they're the same as before), but at least the disallowed pages don't show anymore.

Guys, MSN no longer uses Inktomi. It is a new beast as of 3 weeks ago. So that is why you see changes.

which is why msn has been crawling my site like a beast.. it's crawled almost twice as much as google ;)


Also, mind me asking how many uniques you're getting a day from being #1 in most SE's for that keyword?

It's a very small site, informational only, and a narrow field of interest. The home page gets about 30 to 50 uniques a day. I don't know about the other pages, but presume that it's a good bit less than that.