MSN Search Engine, WTF?

Posted on Thu 11/03/05 in Technical Interleude

Since I started this site in February, I’ve been amazed at the high ranks the MSN search engine has given some of my articles. And today, I am equally dumbfounded at the sudden disappearance of my top-ranking technical article from the search engine, entirely.

Consider these facts:

The MSN Messenger Article I wrote on October 11th has been the #1 result for several search keywords, including random combinations of the following terms: msn, messenger, verify, email etc.

Beginning last week, the referral links from the search engine dropped about 10% per day until reaching zero hits, and it ultimately resulted in this article effectively disappearing from the MSN search engine.

I do not know why. My thought is that it is related to one of the following ideas:

• The article dropped off the “recent articles” list on my home page.

• I’ve been experimenting with the “robots” meta tag during the last month, attempting to disway search engines from pointing to my dynamic front page. Instead, I want the search engine bots to follow the links on my archive page to all of the actual articles.

• As more people comment on the article, the term “link to comment” begins to appear more on the page, thus, its keyword density increased for the article, and the other relevant keywords begin to lose value.

• Microsoft is pissed at me me because I have been attempting to install Fedora Core 4 on my new SATA hard drive. This search engine mysteria began to occur around the same time. Note: I have not been successful with the installation because Fedora keeps dying during the install, complaining that it cannot create my partitions.

Any suggestions? WTF?