Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Thanks.
The other listing which I didn't get read completely differen than any other listing, which is probably the one you were asking about.
Marcia has the right answer, and I'm still puzzled by this, too. It could be the editors at MSN missed something from the Looksmart database, or some other technical issue. Perhaps they are plagued with IIS worms, because they forgot to patch their own servers? (small joke) ;)
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Jag. Good to have you here (and thanks for jumping in on the question.)
With all the new services Looksmart has offered recently, I wouldn't be surprised if this was something new from them...(I know, not very likely, but it could be.)
First site don't even talk about Calorad anywhere. I have no idea how MSN is bringing this for search on Calorad.
Second listing have Calorad neither in Title or description but it's at the top.
Second listing still make a sense. But first one is strange because an online memorial service has nothing to do with weight loss product Calorad.
Thanks to everyone for the input.
What I'm trying to figure out is the balance between the weight of the title and description, which are supplied by LookSmart, and all the on-page criteria, which is dependent on the page's optimization, in determining the order of the Directory sites.
Is the order of directory sites pre-determined, or does MSN apply the same ranking criteria to LS sites as to the Ink sites, ranking each set within it's own grouping? Or is there a separate way of evaluating the LS and Ink sites?
It's not hard to decipher the Ink sites, which are valuable if it's a category where there are only a few in the directory. If there are a couple of pages of directory sites, however, the Ink listing sure won't do much.
In the categories with a lot of directory listings it's critical to be able to figure out what's happening with the ordering of the sites. For one thing, I'm personally looking through to figure some categories to submit for additional LS listings. I just did several paid Ink pages that are first page for several searches, but for another couple of searches there are several pages of directory sites. If there's no way to fight for that first page, it's obviously a waste of money to hand it over to LS with no control over how they might massacre the title and description.
Simply stated, it's not really a fair situation to base it solely on title and description, given the fact that LS can do what they want with titles and descriptions. Then if you're not satisfied down the road, you can pay them another $179 so that they can again do what they want with it. It would be far to easy for them to stack the deck, particularly in favor of those huge corporations that that can do the $2,500 a month deal.
Yes, with some categories it appears to be ordered by title and description. Yet with others, it does not. I've seen different evaluations, with some saying that's what it is, and yet others say the titles are irrelevant since it needs to be the company name in the title, and to make certain to optimize pages prior to LS submmission.
I could be that the first $299 spent is a waste altogether, and that the only way to have a fighting chance to get value back is to spend another $1200 for an additional 4 listings.
The top ten listings in MSN are supplied by a company called DirectHit. Don't get confused with Looksmart yes it will get you in to the top 11 onwards but thats about it. DirectHit also supplies the top ten for some other searches i.e HotBot. Direct Hit chooses the most popular site dependant entirely on whether that site is popular or not. It works this out by finding the most visited sites and also how long each visitor looks at the site so the only way to achieve top 10 is by getting more traffic its as simple as that!!! I don't know how Direct Hit picks up its sites in the first place though?? Inktomi....maybe but unsure.
Why are you guys so quiet about this? You answered my question within a second when I told these guys about it!!! Come on experienced guys share your knowledge and stop holding back.
We're not hiding anything....the fact is that Direct Hit doesn't power MSN's top ten (at least not in the US)
The best explanation that I can find for all the wacky results is MSN's synonym matching (they just seem to be matching words that aren't really synonyms) (this was discussed in another thread)
Check out this SERP for canopy [search.msn.com]. Half of the sites listed are truck sites and don't have the word canopy in their source code or L$ title/descripiton. But you will notice that the "featured site" is a MSN Yellow pages ad asking you to search for truck canopies, so they do relate the two phrases. (if you try the same search on Direct Hit you'll get a completely different set of results)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Basically if you search for "wood" MSN says 'ah you mean "wood" or "timber" or "trees"' etc and returns listings based on these three keywords.
The first batch of results are provided by Looksmart (not including regional categories) thats the 1-30 (ish) results. The next batch of results are from inktomi - but do not include the MSN "advanced synomyn matching" and thus match the order of straight inktomi results.
DirectHit only returns results if people explicitly click - "search popular sites" (note: DirectHit uses MSN branding with a php page !! I hear MSN supports open source movement headlines coming up).
So we are at the mercy of the looksmart editors regarding our positioning in MSN.com. Nothing much we can do to optimise there.
The daft results are basically where MSN says "ah ice, you mean 'water', 'drinks', 'cream'" -- when really you mean't ice and just ice. In a situation where there are very few matching results I think this technology is probably very useful - but where lots of sites match its just confusing.
I've done extensive testing on this and it holds out totally on my sites. Can anyone else confirm this?
Hope this helps to clear things up :)
Gethan
I really don't think that is the case. If it were it would be easy to find out, I see no evidence of a hidden keyword field at Looksmart.
That's the whole point, it will bring the site up on the SERP's and in effect be unhidden. Have a play with [ukplus.com...] they use a "hidden" keyword field.
"this would explain how L$ listed sites without the keywords in the title / desc can occ. pull such high rankings"
I really don't think that this is the case, if it were I would expect the same sites ranking high in looksmart, which isn't happening.
I think the more reasonable explanation is that their synonym matching is not up to par, and is causing some funky results.....
