Forum Moderators: bakedjake
According this article, it stated that tMSN pay attention to at least three additional criteria for determining the relevancy of websites in web directories sections.
1. The title and description of your LookSmart listing
2. Your link popularity socre - Does it come from Inktomi'
3. Your DirectHit popularity
Is it correct?
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(edited by: Marcia at 5:14 pm (utc) on Feb. 12, 2002)
The factors that are covered certainnly factor in a good MSN listing, but what is left out is the most relevant.
Link Pop may be a factor (and if it is, it probably comes from Inktomi) but much more important is a good ranking in Inktomi and meta tags (description) would certainly affect this.
1.Featured listings - rankings are determined by how much you pay - no algorithm.
2.Sponsored listings from Overture - determined by bid amount, no algorithm.
3.Looksmart Directory listings - no way to tell for sure, they're from a human
reviewed diectory. Some say it's the title and description, others say the title doesn't count, optimize the page before submitting. It's too inconstistent to draw any definite conclusions. If there are pages and pages of those in a given category the best you can do is pay and pray. (Unless someone else can tell us more)
4. Last are the Inktomi provided listings and those use an algorithm. You optimize for Inktomi, pay your money and you're in.
There is no free lunch at MSN - it is primarily paid advertising, not a search engine - IMHO. The closest is Inktomi, which at least still has the right to be considered a search engine because they have an algorithm and crawl sites.
So there is no optimizing for MSN as such, there are several approaches and strategizing is necessary.
Hope this helps some.
Ian is right maimax. It's not good information. Read through threads here on Inktomi, Looksmart and Pay-per-click search engines for a broader look at what's going on today at MSN.
Interesting comment from my point of view. I have thought i was optimizing for MSN by covering a large keyword base with just enough density to get acceptable listings when i was missing a word or two, or had the word used only once (_or_ not _and_ being the algo important keyword). But of course a frog never knows when to jump out of a frying pan, maybe i am a frog? But i still get traffic i don't want to jump!
I missed the artical that started this thread but [1. The title and description of your LookSmart listing 2. Your link popularity socre - Does it come from Inktomi' 3. Your DirectHit popularity] I do not agree, its [1. money 2. money 3. money and 4. if nobody will pay for them give them to the frogs]
I'm not clear how with the 48hour spidered pages that link popularity could even enter into it, seems links would have to point to internal pages and they most often don't, and when you make page changes the ranking can change considerably. But it's the only one I can see reasonable control over (without PPC).
I've had 3 months to compare on one site. Dec. with only Ink, Jan. with Ink & Google and Feb. with Google only (Ink pages expired). Rankings better at Google, yet comparatively the conversion was MUCH better with Ink - including both MSN and AOL. So no complaints on them; if the pages don't get back in without subscribing, it sure pays for itself to subscribe in a very short time.
I'm not familiar with Direct Hit, but the 2 pages got traffic all day, so I never thought much about it.
About Looksmart - it seems so inconsistent it's hard to tell anything.
