Forum Moderators: mack
Anyone else experienced such increases due to MSN traffic?
We are struggling with MSN since we are a large site. MSN doesn't seem to want to scratch below the surface. To see what I mean, compare site:www.webmasterworld.com on Google and MSN. MSN has less than 2% the number of pages that Google has.
Well.. I have a focussed site. Professional help forum kind of thing in a particullar sector. Not a narrow set of keywords rather I get many key phrase hits.
Well here's some more facts about my site:
*Clean design.
*Javascript hiding the navigation from search engines.
*A sitemap
*An archive [though we get hits on static pages too]
*Perfect meta tags. Dynamic keywords/description for dynamic pages [though remains constant once set]
*Medium sized site. About 1400 pages.
*keyword oriented page names. [this is one difference in my site from webmasterworld]
*I remember writing to MSN long back when I was getting no hits from MSN but many from Yahoo. Guess I should write back now.
Sell products or provide information?
Provide information and sell products on few pages.
What about Google?
About 20% including our adwords account hits.
Any ideas?
I get 95% from MSN and 0.3% from google for my new site( 4 month old)
Both of them are niche and small size sites for different topics.
We are struggling with MSN since we are a large site. MSN doesn't seem to want to scratch below the surface. To see what I mean, compare site:www.webmasterworld.com on Google and MSN. MSN has less than 2% the number of pages that Google has.
I would agree msn doesn't crawl as deeply. They have a lot of catching up to do so I would atribute it (the shallow crawl) to trying to achieve more breadth in sites to offer a searcher.
That being said they refer about 16% of my traffic to me and have 1100+ of my pages indexed so its no slouch.
Get a feeling that msn is highly dynamic and keeps changing it's index relatively fast OR it re-checks when some SERP is hit and copares with the other pages in the results page.
I have had solid consistent rankings on MSN for my keywords and adds pages just as fast as google does ( a day or so ) after crawling.
perhaps your secor is more competitive than mine
February (through noon est 2/09)
Yahoo 39.2 %
MSN 30.9 %
Google 23.6 %
Google definitely killed us in the update.
January Results
Google 47.7 %
Yahoo 29.4 %
MSN 15.3 %
MSN wasn't even double digits in December 2004.
We have first or second place posistion for many keywords related to the area in all search engines.
Here are the results pre-release of the new SE and after. The click through was in excess of 5000 in each week.
Week of Jan. 16 - 22.
Google - 68.84%
Yahoo - 16.87%
MSN - 11.5%
Alta Vista - 1.68%
Ask Jeeves - .93%
Week of Jan. 30 - Feb. 5
Google - 74.61%
Yahoo - 14.78%
MSN - 8.64%
Alta Vista - 1.00%
Ask Jeeves - 0.91%
It seems to me that MSN's release of their new search engine did nothing to increase traffic at least in our area of search.
It's almost like Google's announcement of huge gains in profits encouraged more people to try them out.
Anyone else experienced such increases due to MSN traffic?
How about this?
Feb. 2005 until 2:30 PM 2/9
MSN 93.4%
Yahoo 5.7%
Google 0.2%
That's my little personal site. I don't do much SEO stuff (no link development, etc.) just write clean code. I get hits on specific search terms, non competitive "money" terms.
MSN was the first to index all the content, about 1,000 pages. Recently the other bots have perked up, but I haven't seen more of my pages in the SERPs yet.
(I did rewrite some pages a little to keep MSN from indexing the site to death it kept slicing and dicing search results ad infinitum -- now I send it to internal link pages instead. MSNbot seems to like that.)
What can you do to get more visits from MSN actually?
Figure out a way for them to get more traffic :-)
(Approximate Referrals Per Day)
1-18-05 = 200
1-25-05 = 500
2-1-05 = 700
2-8-05 = 900
It looks just like a 45 degree angle on our log analysis. In my opinion, there is a big move of traffic to MSN.
Our own site has over 80,000 pages so i would class that as large.
MSN i think is the better engine in relation to content sites relevent to the requested search key words. Also MSN is more up to date as it updates on a regular basis.
The only downside to MSN currently is just the lack of traffic to the search engine in general V google. A lot more people have access to google search than MSN. The whole of AOL uses Google search just for a start!.
Obviously msn are trying to address this with TV and brand awareness but what i think MSN need to do is secure some of the search engines that Google currently feeds by offering better deals.
If they could take some of these off google then more people would see MSN search results, hence greater volumes. It would also in turn improve msns pay per click offerings as well.
Currently Google still get more of the internet traffic full stop compared with MSN. This is no fault of MSNs search engine technology (which im very impressed with so far), this is down to market share which its still early days for MSN to secure.
* Good relevant content.
* Keywords in anchor text in internal / external /incoming / outgoing links.
* MSN Search seems to still place some importance on meta tags. Meta tags appropriate for each page might be beneficial as well. [quote]
* Make certain that each page has unique title tags related to the most important keywords on the page.
* Page URLs should be static html, preferably containing a keyword, or even two keywords.
* Double check that all html tags are closed.
* Be sure to link extensively within the site, using strong link anchor text thematically related to the content of the receiving page.
[beta.search.msn.com...]
Their help pages did say validated HTML was required, they did say "Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages." Therefore, validated HTML will not hurt, and may actually help your ranking in MSN Search.
[[Hardwood Guy said on WebmasterWorld: "Internal link text seems to be a key ingredient by the looks of the new MSN search."]]
[post contains excerpts from various sources]
* MSN Search seems to still place some importance on meta tags. Meta tags appropriate for each page might be beneficial as well.
Maybe not so much. MSNDude says [webmasterworld.com] MSN does not use keyword meta. Title meta does get used in the SERPs copy but IMHO doesn't seem to be that important for ranking.
[url]* Double check that all html tags are closed.[/url]
Yes, but might as well go a step further and validate your html [validator.w3.org].
I also disagree with needing static HTML. Most of my traffic comes from hits onto database-generated pages. The pages do have unique title tags, h2 headers, and keywords in urls. The URL's look like: mysite.net/subdir/123_red_widget
