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.