Ok, I know there are people out there who believe in MSN, not sure why, but they are in the top 3 of those search engines we report results on. So why don’t they read a 301 or accept an XML sitemap yet? I just wish they would really try harder to be a little more – or hell just buy Yahoo already, let’s change up the playing field somehow.

A 301 redirect typically tells a search engine that page A (old URL) moved permanently to page B (a new URL). A search engine will see that 301 status code and log that the new URL is in a new location. Over time, a search engine would replace the original URL with the new URL in the search results, as well as transfer all or most of the links and signals associated with the original URL to the new URL. Google is fast with this, Yahoo picks up on this and although Ask.com is slow, they eventually get it as well. So, what up with MSN you ask? Great question.

MSN’s answer is they simply can not handle a 301 redirect at this time. Sorry folks!