Forum Chatter 07/13/2006

Three interesting forums threads as of late:

Msndude explains why Windows Live is seemingly stricter on adult content than MSN Search.

“I think, but the reason for the difference is that the live.com beta has the adult content filter set to “strict,” while search.msn.com uses the moderate setting. Once the beta actually offers a control to let users change the setting, it will produce results identical to search.msn.com. That should be soon. But it really is the same search engine behind both of them.”

Make sense? Msndude (do you wish you knew his real name too?) also clarifies the difference between an “index update” and a “software update” for users who may have been confused by his assertion that MSN doesn’t update on the weekends.

“Making a software update is like shipping a product; lots of people are involved, there’s lots of planning, testing, etc. A software update is a big deal.

An index update, on the other hand, happens automatically — usually at least once a day — and no one here pays it much mind unless they’re debugging a problem that might be affected by it. An index update is nothing special. Kind of like breathing; you don’t think about it at all if things are going well.”

I know I’ve said this before, but I really like msndude. And he’s starting to make me tolerate MSN Search by association, which is really is the point, isn’t it?

Elsewhere, at WMW a forum member expressed frustration over his 301 redirect woes. Taking the advice of Googlers like Matt Cutts, the member attempted to avoid future trouble by redirecting the non-www version of his site to the www version. Unfortunately, after he did that, Google decided to drop all his pages. Oops.

The member spent nearly a year waiting for Google to figure it out and then decided to just get rid of the 301. Once he did, his pages were back exactly how they had been ten months prior. In case you’re thinking this is just another case of user error, the member was able to provide everyone with enough detail to discount that. It looks like this member really did know what he was doing and Google just dropped the ball.

In another thread over at WMW, Crobb305 asks members whether Yahoo! is able to ban a site while still allowing it to rank for its selected keywords. Forum opinion says yes.

WMW member Otc_cmnn shared his own experience with Yahoo!’s supposed “hand coding” and claims he was able to retain his number one Yahoo! rankings for his keywords even after his fully indexed, 100K+ page site was banned. (Otc_cmnn claims he doesn’t know the reason behind the banning.)

As far as I can tell, the one thing Otc_cmnn and Crobb305 have in common is that both had pages linked to by DMOZ. Does Yahoo! have enough “trust” in DMOZ to override its own banning, or is this just another case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing over at Yahoo?

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

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