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    Hi

     

    My site is www.lingerie2u.com.

    Using MSN webmaster tools, my sites index page is showing as language/da, which I assume is Danish.

    The site is written in English, hosted in the UK, and is mainly for the UK market.

    If I go on msn.co.uk and use the search term "uk lingerie" my site is ranked at number 141, if I go to the Danish version of MSN at msn.da it ranks at number 7 for the same term.

    I haven't used any dodgy linking strategies or seo tactics.

    I'm reluctant to alter my site to pander to the whims of MSN as my site ranks highly on Google and Yahoo. For example on Yahoo.co.uk it ranks at number 1 for the same search term.

    Why is MSN so out of sync with all the other search engines? Why are the webmaster tools so limited. Take a look at google analytics if you want to know whats happening on your site.

    Below is a listing taken from msn.co.uk for the search term "uk lingerie" ranked at number 14.

     

    www.1netshop.co.uk

    A fatal MySQL error occured: Table 'overture.url_index_20080601' doesn't exist

    If thats what MSN thinks is a useful URL, they really do have serious problems.

     

     

    Is there any way I can get MSN to understand that the index page is english?

     

    Mark

    Monday, June 2, 2008 9:43 PM

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    Hi,

     

    There are numerous reasons why your site is showing up as Danish. Not to rule out issues with the search engine itself,  a couple common reasons are where either the edge servers are garbling the language so our AI tries to interpret the best it can or, you or your webhosting company has some value selected somewhere making us think it is Danish. 

     

    These webmaster tools are still in beta, so it is natural to assume there are going to be bugs--what beta do you know that doesn't have some bugs? We are working to provide webmasters with a tool to select market/language, but for now, you can request a language change through filling out our support form: https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlcom&ct=eformts Select "other" and request the language classification change. 

     

    Brett

    Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:02 PM

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    Hi Mark,

    You have a great site still it needs some html error check.

    Pls try these steps for your present problem.....

     

     

    Though I could not see the original html code of your page to check, I doubt there is some problem with your Doctype declaration.

    You may try changing your starting <html> like this......

     

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

    <head>

     

     

     

    You have ...         <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">   ( ....this is unicode worldwide, so more general in nature )

     

    Change it to ...   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />    (....this is for Western Europe)

     

     

    Don’t forget to update the sitemap.xml file’s <lastmod> tag for the index page after the changes and resubmit the xml file to MSN

     

     

     

    Hope this will help MSN to identify the page language as EN

     

    Please post the result you get, I am always with you to try to solve problems.

     

     kris_india

    Wednesday, June 4, 2008 3:42 AM
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    Hi,

     

    There are numerous reasons why your site is showing up as Danish. Not to rule out issues with the search engine itself,  a couple common reasons are where either the edge servers are garbling the language so our AI tries to interpret the best it can or, you or your webhosting company has some value selected somewhere making us think it is Danish. 

     

    These webmaster tools are still in beta, so it is natural to assume there are going to be bugs--what beta do you know that doesn't have some bugs? We are working to provide webmasters with a tool to select market/language, but for now, you can request a language change through filling out our support form: https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlcom&ct=eformts Select "other" and request the language classification change. 

     

    Brett

    Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:02 PM
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    Thanks for the reply. The funny thing is there are 80+ other pages indexed and it managed to get the language right on those. Its only the index page that is causing the problem.

     

    Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:49 PM
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    Hi Kris

     

    Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm going to try going through MSN first, but if that doesn't work I'll try your method.

    I'l let you know the outcome shortly.

     

    Thanks

     

    Mar

    Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:51 PM
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    They sorted out the problem in the end and it is now classified as English. Only trouble now is that it only indexes the home page.

    MSN's robots are useless!!!!

     

    Friday, October 10, 2008 10:16 PM