Looksmart and Rankings

How does Looksmart base your ranking?

[dinnerware]

I am interested in getting traffic from MSN, thus I have considered the Looksmart program. However, I am unclear on how they determine your ranking on a specific keyword.
Is it like the rest...based on keyword, meta tags, etc. or is there something else? Any input is appreciated.

[Laisha]

Welcome, dinnerware.

MSN pulls directory -- including Zeal -- results before Inktomi.

Thanks, startup. :)

[dinnerware]

I am familar with that part but I was curious if anyone is aware of how you can guesstimate where your site will fall within Looksmart thus the MSN rankings. I have noticed if you do a search for "widgets" on Looksmart and than "widgets" on MSN the rankings are totally different for the Looksmart portion. Is there some curve MSN puta on the rankings?

[Adria]

The rankings at MSN are ranked in a completely different fashion from LookSmart. MSN has their own search engine; they just buy the directory listings from LS. LookSmart ranks sites as a standard directory, meaning that keyword searches are matched against words in the directory listing title, description, category, URL, and also in the "relevance keywords" you choose to associate for your listing.

MSN, on the other hand, has editors choose the sites and the precise order of ranking for the most popular queries. If the query is not popular enough to be addressed individually by an editor, or if you look on the second page of results (the editors rarely, if ever, bother to index past the first page) then the MSN search algorithm ranks the sites based on the presence of the keyword in the title, description, category, and URL. They do not use LS's "relevance keywords." Furthermore, MSN's algorithm does not weight keyword presence in metadata (by this I mean the directory listings) the way LookSmart's does, and so a high-ranking site at LS may not rank highly at MSN, and vice verse.