MSN - Europes Portal No.1?

How important is MSN for you?

[heini]

MSN just came out claiming to be the Numero Uno in European portal market with the largest user base and most unique visits, leavng Yahoo and AOL behind.

MSN now gets hits from 52 per cent of internet users each month, compared to 40 per cent for rivals Yahoo! and 22 per cent for AOL.

source:microsoft.com [microsoft.com]

Really? Figures given are based upon Nilesen/Jupiter - believed to belong to the more reliable sources in web measurement.

But then - how many of those unique visits are driven by people just checking their Hotmail accounts? Judy Gibbons, President of MSN EMEA, confirms email services as well as SMS services make for the success of MSN in Europe.

The third core service is according to Gibbons MSN websearch. Now this is the part I found very hard to believe. I never came across someone with decent Google and Fast listings who claimed MSN as top referrer.

Do people really use MSN websearch?
Part of the answer might be Internet Explorer - defaulting to send users to MSN search.

[NFFC]

Taking Google out of the equation they are top for me here in the UK, happened over the last 6 months.

[Rumbas]

From a general european perspective the picture is similar to yours NFFC; take out Google, and MSN is dominating the top slots on quite a few domains as a top referrer.

Tells me that local Looksmart listings are getting more important?

[brotherhood of LAN]

my MSN NETWORK traffic shot up after a listing in Zeal. Yep, traffic shot up, they seem to be players, no doubt traffic spinning off from hotmail over the months.......

[tigger]

MSN have been in my top 3 for sometime, but now that Freeserve is displaying google it's not going to take much for them to knocked into third position

[cfel2000]

Google are Google so of course their my number one, however, MSN is also vital to us.

[caine]

They are certainly important, but not numero uno.

1. Google.com
2. MSN.com
3. google.Yahoo.com
4. Google.co.uk
5. MSN.co.uk

[msgraph]

>>>how many of those unique visits are driven by people just checking their Hotmail accounts?

There is the answer to your question :)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Hotmail is definetely a factor. Especially when you sign out you jump straight into MSN, plus the 1000001 other ways that you can probably "accidentally" find MSN

Maybe teoma could find itself lurking amongst the top 5 ;)

[Liane]

MSN is still important to me, but is diminishing in hits (despite excellent rankings) every month.

MSN used to be number 2 for me, but ever since they made it so difficult for people with older browsers to use their site, traffic dropped off drastically. In a surprising turn of events, AOL has been knocked down to 8th place in my logs for March! They used to be number 4 or 5 consistantly.

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Google/Yahoo
4. MSN
5. Link Partners and Industry Directories
6. Alta Vista ???
7. Netscape ????????!!!!
8. AOL??????

[louponne]

msn.fr
Anyone know if there are any "tricks" to getting into their directory?

I had some sites in there that have recently disappeared, and have other sites that I've never been able to get listed. Is it just the simple submission page and then "fingers crossed" ?

[tigger]

I would presume it the same as all the other MSN sites.

have a .fr domain
submit to looksmart.fr
try to get into Ink, paid or free

Hope :)

[Rumbas]

Tigger is absolutely right. MSN.fr is the same as all the other MSN's and the US version.

Web Directory Sites = Looksmart
Web Pages = Inktomi
And yes, they do like local TLD's very much. As a matter of fact you're pretty doomed with out it.

Note: The web pages results can change a bit depending on which MSN you use. We've talked about it here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[louponne]

Thanks for your answers!!

> submit to looksmart.fr
> try to get into Ink, paid or free

So what's the use of the submission form directly on msn.fr ?

[Macguru]

I submit my french sites (most are) to MSM.fr directory ( *http://search2.msn.fr/suggestions/ ). Its free and sometimes lead to results. More than half of them got more pages in Inktomi.

Just remember its a human reviewd directory.

[heini]

That's a very good question Louponne.
While in general it's true what Rumbas and tigger said there's more to it.
In Germany MSN has a submission option which leads to allesklar.de, the biggest german directory. Getting listed in allesklar is free, and it feeds your site to MSN.de catalogue.
As far as I know this very much the same in Farnce, only I'm not sure if MSN handles the submission themselfes or through a partner.
Perhaps some local expert can enlighten us here?

<added>AH - Macguru is already here - posted whlie I was still writing - thanks Mac</added>

[louponne]

> I submit my french sites (most are) to MSM.fr directory

Meaning that it's an entirely independant directory then?

> More than half of them got more pages in Inktomi.

Meaning that submitting ot the msn.fr directory got your pages into Inktomi? So you're saying that submitting there serves two separate databases??

[Macguru]

Yes louponne,

MSN directory submission will land you here.
[search.msn.fr...]

It is an independant directory but nobody is using it. I see it as a free backdoor to Ink for French sites.

[louponne]

ok, thanks MacGuru! :-)

[Macguru]

OOps! forgot to mention I also had pages removed from the MSN.fr directory recently.

[Rumbas]

>msn.fr/suggestions/
>allesklar feeds your site to MSN.de catalogue

I know that a time ago MSN had their own reviewers, but I thought it had all been outsourced to L$ - also in Europe. So just to be sure here, are you saying that we don't need to go through Looksmart to get into MSN in Germany and France?

Getting listed in L$ used to trigger an Inktomi crawl. Wonder if this is still the case?

[Macguru]

Only one thing I am sure of. Getting a site in MSN.fr directory do trigger the Ink crawl. But not all of them get in for free.

Large sites with short text on each pages seem to do better.

[louponne]

I've just dug up a bit of info filed away in september '01 :
annuaire de MSN [search.msn.fr] réalisé par la société
Lamine [lamine.com]

And indeed, on the site of lamine.com, they list msn as a client.

ah-hah!