MSN puzzling.....

Keyword is first word in title but....

[skibum]

...listing doesn't show up till about #70 out of about 80 directory results and only 4 of the results above this listing have the keyword in the title or description. The rest have it nowhere. Not one site in the top 50 has it in the LookSmart listing.

It's a mix of paid and free results in the top 70 spots so its not all hand picked sites. Its a new listing. Is it likely to fluctuate for a while and move higher as MSN recalculates the new additions?

Ranks are great for other secondary keywords that Overture shows up to 5k searches/day on but got no traffic so far....

[madmal]

Msn has a different search criteria as google.

check the following :
1) meta tags
2) title tag
3) copywriting
4) images alt attribute

[skibum]

Actually these are LookSmart listings syndicated to MSN so I don't think anything but the title and description in LookSmart affect the rankings.

It seems like MSN has a variety of different filters in place. In order to show up for some terms on MSN via LookSamrt, the keyword has to be in the title. In other cases there is something that makes listings w/o keywords anywhere in the listings beat out those that do.

With so much cash at stake, its not surprising that the results are treated differently. MSN probably edits the rankings for some terms or else attaches relevancy keywords to them that aren't publicy disclosed.

[Janet]

When Looksmart changed to a "pay per click" model, it allowed customers to list keywords for which they wanted their site found. They do this when you set up the account for the site. It has nothing to do with keywords that may or may not be embedded in the web page or in the directory Description or Title.

The sites that are being ranked without visibly displaying those keywords, have probably been set up like this.

[skibum]

Do those keywords carry over to MSN or do they jsut influence the LookSmart rankings?

[Adria]

The LookSmart keywords are not part of the metadata used by MSN. Also, none of the HTML META tags or any other code elements have any affect on the ranking of directory listings at MSN.

Some other points about MSN:

Being a paid listing from LookSmart does not directly affect whether or not MSN's editors choose to place you on the first page of results for a query. When they're handpicking results, they are simply looking for the best possible answer to the query, and they don't care where it comes from. That's also why you will (somewhat rarely) see a listing in MSN results that is not in LookSmart's results--the MSN editor added it to MSN's directory by hand because she wasn't satisfied with the choice of listings from LookSmart.