sabai - 11:45 pm on Oct 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

I found the time to look more closely at the SERPs, comparing msn.co.in with msn.com - the results are nearly the same, but with with some pages dropping down the rankings and others moving up to fill the space in the same order as before. I am not seeing any new ones in their place, having looked at about ten less competetive keywords.

I think that whatever the algo change is, it is some form of penalisation, otherwise the order of the results would have changed. Check your pages for anything that might be wrong with your pages that were dropped down.

Please everybody don't shout at me at once, but one of the things I did on a few of my pages was to have ★ stars in my titles - I knew it would not last forever, but it is something which really stands out in a SERP. The debate as to whether or not this is spam has been covered already... anyway, I saw a few pages with HTML characters in the meta description, so this could be one thing that is being penalised... HTML characters in the description, or title.

I took the stars out and I'll post the results in a few days - a lot of people complain about PFI inktomi, but I love the fact that I can make a change and see how it affects the ranking about three days later.... I don't think it's possible to achieve that with free inktomi.