What's up with MSN?

1 or 2 for 6 months, and then wammo! - 35

[Axacta]

For 6 months my most important keyword phrase has been number 1 or 2 in the SERPS and then the other day it just drops to number 35. Although my site is constantly spidered by Inktomi, MSN has always listed it from Zeal. Does anybody know anything about Zeal listings being downgraded? And how can I check to see if I am listed in Inktomi?

[agerhart]

Inktomi Pure Search [169.207.238.189]

[Axacta]

Thanks agerhart.

[Axacta]

Well this is very interesting - on Inktomi it is listed number 3! Can anybody offer an explanation? Any officials here from MSN or Inktomi or Zeal that can explain this?

[Axacta]

Bumpity, bump.

Surely somebody must have an idea what's going on at MSN...

[rfgdxm1]

The Looksmart/Zeal listings are totally independent from the Inktomi search engine results. My best guess is MSN burped. Or, they are tweaking Inktomi results a lot different than the pure search.

[mundonet]

Nobody has an "idea what's going on at MSN". Sometime there's Overture, sometime not. Sometime they insert ads from their own placement program, Top ten is there or not, Looksmart puts our free old directory listing or not, which is legit relevant results which is ads? Messy!

[Axacta]

Yes I have noticed some of those inconsistancies that you mention. Messy - I agree. Does anybody know how to e-mail MSN Search? I could find nothing on their site, but maybe I just missed it.

[RuglesHome]

MSN search has been a mess for several weeks. I am not even going to try to figure it out until they decide to display their seach results in a consistant manner.
They are ruining their brand (for search I mean) and driving traffic to google.

[martinibuster]

Forgive me if I restate the obvious.

My understanding is that Sponsored Listings come first.

Then the Zeal/Looksmart Directory listings come next. I suspect that equally relevant directory serps may be ordered by how long they've been in their respective directory cats, with priority given to the older entries. This is a guess extrapolated from examining one of my client's serps.

Next come the Web Pages results, which I understand are pretty much Inktomi.

A couple weeks back, I noticed that Ink had set loose a lot of my unpaid listings onto MSN, which boosted my rankings to the top 7 (where previously I had been hovering around 12-17). I just rechecked and I've fallen back to my previous levels so I figure Ink must have re-crunched their DB to remove the unpaid listings of sites that also had paid listings. Darn!

I never mentioned this before because I didn't want to jinx my unpaid listings.

Could the expanded ink db have affected your rankings? Not sure if this is relevant to your situation but I think it adds to the general knowledge base and is food for further examination.