Why does Live search continue to rank dead websites?
Why is it that Live search continues to return a broken link at the top of the rankings, even though the website has not been live since the end of January? Is this the main reason that Live search has a 8.2% market share in the US and Google has a 64.2% market share.
So why is Live search still returning an illegal movie website at the top of their rankings for a popular keyword term?
www.watch-movies.net was apparently closed down and reopened under another domain – which is a different argument altogether – and still returns on page one in Live.com for the search term ‘Download Movies Online‘, so why is this? Why does a search engine that wants to compete with Google still returns a broken link to an apparent illegal website within their SERP’s? There are many legitimate Movies available online – so why is a perfectly normal search query returning poor results?
Take a look at the screenshot below:
This is appearing in your search results today for a highly competitive keyword term. So why is it still there? Does Live continue to reward the huge volumes of backlinks pointing to the website? For some reason the webmaster didn’t place a 301 redirect on the website – which of course would have passed over page value and history to the new domain.
Take a look at the performance of the website within Google, Yahoo! and Live over the past five months:
So Yahoo! didn’t even rank the website highly in the first place, Google did but immediately the ranking dropped once the content was removed (even though there were a vast number of backlinks pointing to the website) and then there is Live, which continues to rank a website highly (amidst some fluctuations it has to be said) that hasn’t be live for over four months……and people wonder why Google has such a stronghold online.
Tags: illegal websites, Live search, rankings, SEO
May 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I have to admit, I didn’t know that this was actually the case with Live. But to be fair, I haven’t used it since that one time about 10 years ago. Though evidently, this is the case. I have to say this is very shocking to me, now that its been brought to light. This also makes me wonder as to what other types of illegal content Live could be indexing to its public. Its definitely a scary thought and needs to be rectified – Promptly! This only reflects Google’s awesomeness over the internet. The market shares say it all.
May 17th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Yeah interesting piece. Do Live’s Bots simply have less inteligence than Google’s? Or does the Algorithm still pick up old sites?
May 18th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Poggers, since when have search engines been concerned with the legality of the sites they link to?