Uber_SEO - 9:35 am on Sep 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

Hi msndude - thanks for taking the time out to listen to our concerns.

I wouldn't say that msn is entirely bad. You're very efficient at crawling and adding pages to your index (so you're better than Yahoo on that), and new sites don't suffer any form of sandbox (so you're better than Google on that).

The problem is just with your results. I can't quite put my finger on why it happens, but a search in MSN just doesn't provide me with the results I'm after. To be honest, it looks like it favours poorly optimised, poorly linked in sites, over big sites that you'd expect to see at the top of the SERPs.

I'll try and give you a few examples of the strange things that I've seen it do:

(1) Subdomains
I don't know what it is about subdomains, but MSN seems to love them. If I have a well established domain, www.widget.com, PR 7, and it has a subdomain, widget.widget.com, PR 2, MSN would rather rank my site for it's core terms under the subdomain.

(2) Ranking on the homepage
If I create a page on a site that I optimise for Widgets. I get external links with link text Widgets to that page. I link it in with link text Widgets from my homepage (which otherwise has no mention of the term Widgets). If you search for Widgets, then you'd expect my Widgets page to rank. So why does MSN always rank the homepage instead, based on the 1 instance of Widgets link text on there?

(3) Sitemaps
Another random thing I've seen is sitemaps ranking. Imagine that I have a transport site that has 3 pages that are optimised for Widgets to Location1, Widgets to Location2, Widgets to Location3, and these are all linked with respective link text from the sitemap. If I search for Widgets to Location1, rather than that page ranking, the sitemap ranks.

I think my opinion is that MSN loves keyword density. Therefore, sort out a subdomain called widget.widgets-widget.com, add Widgets as much as possible to your homepage title and the homepage content, and you'll be sorted for #1 position for Widgets in MSN. Until this is sorted, there's going to be a lot of poor results cropping up in your SERPs.

Thanks for taking the time to listen - your feedback is much appreciated.