I spotted two thread this month discussing how little Microsoft is indexing their sites but how often Microsoft’s bot, MSNbot, is crawling their sites.

A WebmasterWorld thread and DigitalPoint Forums thread has details of the newish behavior from MSNbot. BillyS at WebmasterWorld explains:

Billy, as others, wonder if they should just block MSNBot all together, since they feel the traffic they received from Live Search is not worth the stress the bot puts on the server when they crawl.

Let’s do some comparisons of Google versus Live Search in site command counts:

site:www.seroundtable.com – Google 12,800 vs. Live Search 268site:www.google.com – Google 1,680,000 vs. Live Search 330site:www.flickr.com – Google 71,000,000 vs. Live Search 268site:www.webmasterworld.com – Google 446,000 vs. Live Search 357

So either I am doing something wrong or Live Search’s site command is wrong, or Live Search forgot how to index pages?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft sent me a response to this post, which I felt would be great to add.