I recently relaunched a website from a single static page to a full-blown site with around 20 pages. The site structure fits within the guidelines (of course) and I did some link-building to get some general link-juice and to get the site to rank for the business name.

With Google and Yahoo! results were as expected. Within a few days the site was ranking for the fairly unique business name.

Microsoft’s Live search engine on the other hand was lagging. In fact, the cache date hasn’t updated in months.

I got a recommendation to try adding an XML sitemap and ping it through the Live Search Webmaster Tools. Which I did and we’ll see if that helps but judging by Microsoft’s support forum, I see little help coming…

One poster claims the new Webmaster Tools themselves are the problem though a representative from Microsoft denied it. The poster says once he deleted the identification code Webmaster Central requires to verify site ownership, his indexing went from nothing to a few hundred pages per day. That’s quite a jump. And it could be coincidence.

It seems the slowdown in crawl rates started in October so my suggestion is if you were using the Webmaster Tools before November, try deleting the identifying XML file. If you weren’t, try what I’m doing and sign up to see if that gives MS a kick in the pants.

Either way, if you are experiencing crawl delays, drop by the official MS Webmaster Forums and drop a complaint. Squeaky wheels get greased.

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