In response to an inquiry submitted by a web site owner, Microsoft's Live Search technical team admitted Sunday afternoon that its URL submission portal is once again incorrectly publishing URLs in its search results index.
In mid November, Live Search openly admitted to many web site owners that problems with the software that publishes its search results had led to a variety of problems including missing, duplicated and incorrectly puplished URLs. Owner of Solenarodesigns.com, a site that sells custom made horse hair jewelry informed Live Search that an incorrect URL had been associated with its home page, leading customers to a 404 error (web page does not exist). After repeated correspondence with Live Search technicians, it was determined that the erronious URL was a result of a problem with the search engine's URL submission portal.
Early Sunday morning, the home page for solenarodesigns.com reappeared in Live Search...once again with an incorrect URL. Several emails were exchanged between the site owner and Live Search and once again the error has been blamed on the submission portal. The admission was sent to the owner of the site in the following email:
Hello xxxxxx,
Thank you for contacting Live Search technical support.
We understand that you are having a problem right now with your site < a) not being indexed in Live Search or b) not being found in Live Search when looking for it using key words>.
We are aware of this problem, and it is not affecting your site alone. We discovered an error in the programming that submits URL's to our search engine and we are in the process of fixing it. In the next few days you will be to go to the site http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx and submit your URL again. We will process the site through our anti-spam and content filters and include the site and rank it appropriately. The entire process should take about 2 weeks to complete, but may take longer depending on the number of pages in your domain, the content, how the page was written, and other factors.
We thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue, and invite you to contact us again if your site is still not indexed in our results after 2 weeks. You can check if your site is indexed by going to http://search.live.com, and typing "site:<site name>" into the search bar. You don't need quotes, and you should replace <site name> with the name of your site or URL that you are checking.
Thanks again for contacting Live Search support.
When asked to comment on the issue, the site owner noted that the explainatory email sent to him Sunday was a duplicate of the email he recieved in November when the URL problem was first discovered. "I have been a strong supporter of Live Search but there comes a time when you start to lose the faith. This is one of those times." stated the site owner.
AND...
If you enter search term "microsoft's Live Search broken again" most of the posts to this forum for this thread are in "their" SERPS already. Amazing how easy they make it look. Wonder how quickly the major internet news sites will pick up and post this story? Evidently faster than Live Search will. Just wanted to share "ideas and report issues". At least someone out there is listening. Unfortunately it's not Microsoft!!!
