f13.net

Every day or so I do a search to see if somebody has figured out how to fix my Guild Wars graphics crashing problem and I just discovered that MSN Search is indexing these forums but Google is not. Presumably that'll drive more traffic to this site as people use MSN Search more.

We get 10x more people from Google straight to the forums than from MSN.

That's probably because 10x more people use Google. Or something.

Interesting. Well Google does index the rest of the site, just not the actual forum content as far as I've seen.

Odd...They did last time I searched.

Maybe someone complained about all the swear words so they blacklisted 'forums.f13.net'.


Edit: not to mention the ghastly pictures.

No one complained. Google doesn't censor like that.

It's still getting indexed. The robots were on just the other night.

Google is indexing the forums.  Try the following link, in which I've restricted the search to f13.net only (I used the -site option on Google's main page):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=guild+wars+%2Bsite%3Awww.f13.net&btnG=Google+Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=guild+wars+%2Bsite%3Awww.f13.net&btnG=Google+Search)

Scroll down, and you'll see links to www.f13.net/forums.  Perhaps the confusion results from the redirect to forums.f13.net, but a web robot wouldn't necessarily see that depending upon how it was implemented.

Well they aren't doing a very good job of it. When I click on the above link the only result that points to the forums in on the 4th page and gives a 404 error since it uses the old forum URL.

Here are some phrases you can test my hypothesis on:

"Smedley is the new playerauctions"
-- MSN returns the thread, Google shows nothing

"positional advantage in the market"
-- MSN returns Abagadro post at the bottom, Google doesn't

"guild wars" f13.net
-- MSN returns too much stuff from f13.net -- they've effectively over-indexed that phrase (click on show more results from "forums.f13.net" to see what I mean) while Google returns two links to the forum, one of which goes to the wrong place

I wouldn't expect Google to index the Entire forums here.

Random testing seems to indicate that this is true.

I just went through the stats:

Heh. MSN is crawling us 40x more than Google. But we still get 10x more people from google.

Guess who has the better search engine.

Effective marketing/mindshare beats out technology?
Noisy sizzle & salt beats well-aged steak everytime?

Sorry my post is apropos of nothing.  It just slipped out.  Damn you fingers!

Neither, both blow goats at the momment. Google just has a much larger share of the market for now. However, since SEOs have had Google cracked for a couple years now and Google has fucked up their own search engine trying to foil them, Google is now as fucked as AltaVista was at the end of the nineties. Oh, it's still decent for niche searches, but anything competitive is a waste of time, and the sandbox they put new sites into coupled with the weight they add for site age guarantees that their searches will continue to get worse and worse.

For a lot of searches though MSN actually does provide fresher, more relevant results. Unfortunately, they put paid results at the top and bottom top and bottom the page.