RichTC - 3:16 pm on May 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

Many webmasters gave up on msn due to the low reach it has, the fact that the results have always been unusable and the lack of interaction by msn with the webmaster community.

Currently, for the first time in years it looks like real improvements are being made.

I agree that its not perfect or of the quality of Yahoo or Google but to be fair they dont have the link history or search engine experience of the other two more established players. Heck, they still cant index a number of sites, deep crawl them and still have authority sites missing from their index but this is due to resources being wasted on junk sites being serviced and included that we dont want in their index because they still struggle to know what is good from the junk. If they could channel their energy towards indexing quality the results would be better, but that being said their serps are getting better and they can still improve.

The link and site history issue is something that they cant have and no matter what shifts they make to their algo they will always have problems due to this because of the amount of spam, junk and garbage sites on the internet that they still struggle with whilst ignoring sites they should be including.

Having given this lots of thought rather than moaning about how bad they are we should help look for solutions. We need a strong alternative to google, its good for all of us.

i genuninely think that one way they could improve results in the UK is by setting up a live site directory. Charge a site an annual fee for a review. Those webmasters with quality sites would pay, the spammers and garbage wouldnt. Those in the directory would be msn verified sites they could give weight to in their live serps - this is a sure way to provide serps quality.

I know directory sites are old hat now but you cant re-invent the wheel. msn need a stable set of own trusted data to pull from and the only way to get this is by site review. In an ideal world if they hand reviewed every site and graded them they would have the best search engine results anywhere, obviously this cant be done but even if they had 10% of trusted data their results would be superb.

Its not just about reviewing and listing a specific site. If the site is known to be quality by msn and "trusted" the links to other sites from it would also likely to be good and this is more data they can use. Quality sites dont link to garbage. If the site did it could be removed at the following years review renewal.

If you think about this Yahoo have the best directory in the market and use this data in their serps. Google meanwhile dont have their own directory but have a long history of sites, they know what the original authority sites are and part of their algo imo includes a factor for links from "trusted sites" so they can rate a site better, no doubt Yahoo directory is a google trusted site!.

I wouldnt use Third party data from an independent directory like dmoz or another due to corruption risks they could suffer but a good quality own build directory, staff only verified could really help msn improve their offering imo - just a thought anyway

Rich