MSN, What is my problem?

I have more pages indexed and more relvancy, but I still rank horrible.

[phbk9d]

I am trying to figure out exactly just what I am doing wrong or maybe I am not doing anything wrong and MSN results just aren't good, but I hear everyone talking about how good they are so I need to see why. I have a site that is about 1 million pages or so with pretty good content across the board. Sure some pages have more unique content than others, but for the most part we have pretty good content. MSN visits our site constantly and daily hitting our site on averge every 7 seconds. Everyday we grow about 500-1000 new pages in the index, so we are growing constatnly in the index.

Even with the MSNbot visiting our site constatntly, lots of pages in the index, and many unique keyword combinations that are extremely relevant on our site, we are burried deep in the results. We don't even come up above #4 for our own company name. The sites above us are just sites that link to us. I am not talking about competetive keywords, I am talking about keywords within our small niche, but sites come up that have nothing to do with these keywords. Also for our competetive keywords, we normally compete on Google and Yahoo with the same group of sites and do very well against them. However, in MSN it looks like we don't even try, but when we go and do a site:competitor.com, we are killing our competitors in the amount of relevant pages indexed. It seems as though we can't get above a certain number. A lot of times the pages in front of us don't even have these keywords anywhere on their pages.

Is there some type of an MSN sandbox or filter that will only allow me to go over a certain amount, and if so what could cause this? You would think that if we were that penalized, wouldn't you think MSN would not visit our site and index some many pages every day? I could really use everyone's personal thoughts and experiences on this.

I understand that backlinks are very important, but sometimes we will find ourselves behind sites that don't even have backlinks, and we will have at least some targeted backlinks. It just seems odd that we can't ever reach the top even for our company name. Sites that really don't even mention us will rank above us always. We can't hit above #4 on anything, and when we hit #4 there are only 4 results. If there are more results we find ourselves around like 200-500.

Can anyone please give us some expert opinions! Does anyone else experience this?

[sincraft]

Well guess what. I would love to know the same. I've listened to many of the posts in these forums, and many people that proclaim to be SEO experts. To be honest, I think it's 50% luck and 50% skill anymore. IF you type in our keyword, say: widgets in MSN, you get a myriad of pages coming up. One of which when you goto it uses the SAME software as we do and is VERY ugly, VERY poorly designed and horribly setup with metatags etc. The keyword saturation is almost no-existent..and the links they have on their website are mostly not relevent. I've gotten to the point of frustration now. We have only been up for about 1.5months now - and already have 800 pages index by msn, but you check the other 'big boy' search engines, and we have 0 ranking. OUR EB*Y STORE IS RANKED HIGHER! LOL
Do a search for our keywords on msn, and we show up on page 15. :(
These forums need stickys with known good methods for each search engine in each forum. Because sifting through these posts is starting to get old to get 'real' answers anymore. I know there aren't any REAL answers because if there were..then 50% of the people out there would be doing it. But at least a HINT as to what REALLY works would be nice. I'd love to share this site with you all so you could see what I am talking about vs ours. You would be totally amazed as it is a HIGHLY competitive keyword and their comments tags etc arent even in place. Most of them mention the actual software being used where they should have been changed. I'm flabergasted(sp?).

[timster]

OUR EB*Y STORE IS RANKED HIGHER! LOL

Since it's that bad, don't you think your sites must be getting penalized for something or other? (I mean, rather than your site just missing something MSN likes, MSN is finding something it really dislikes.)

I'm guessing success stories of how sites are ranking very well in MSN won't help much, since those folks were obviously not penalized.

[HughMungus]

I have the opposite problem. I can't figure out how I'm ranking so well on MSN. I add an affiliate text ad and soon I'm #2 or 3 for that term...and this is with no SEO other than common sense stuff, no link exchanges, no nothing.

sin, good luck getting that info. Don't forget that we're all competing with each other for traffic and I doubt anyone here who is doing really well is going to give up the info so that you can compete with him (except generally or theoretically).

[gmiller]

I assume those are affiliate text ads with the keyphrase in them? MSN seems to go crazy over outbound anchor text. One is all it takes to bring a page way up in the SERPs, even if that keyphrase occurs nowhere else on the page.

Additional outbounds with the same keyphrase don't seem to have all that much effect, though.

[phbk9d]

Ok, now it has really gotten even better. (Sarcastic) For our specific keywords, we are getting beat out time and time again by a site that is extermely spammy. At least I would consider them that way, maybe others woudn't. They have at the bottom of their pages, drop down menues stuffed with keywords, and then giant lists of all their keywords just comma seprated out at the bottom of each page. Those words at the bottom, none of which are links, are causing us to be ranked lower than them. I refuse to regenerate what they are doing because frankly if looks horrible, but it sure does suck that I have to rank behind them because of these SEO tactics used.

[HughMungus]

I assume those are affiliate text ads with the keyphrase in them? MSN seems to go crazy over outbound anchor text.

Actually, yes. And now that you mention it, the reason I might be ranking so well on some terms is because most of the rest of the world is probably using banners without text for its links and I'm using text links (which would be rare for the one affiliate on the top of my head right now). Thanks.

I've also theorized that since I have a page for each outbound link that MSN could be heavily weighting the % of text that is the keyword text. That is, the higher the amount of text on a page, the less value the keyword has because it's less of a % of the total text on the page than the alternative.

[vabtz]

My experience is they love my on page text links the most.

Also today they are indexing my forum like crazy since I pushed many of my forum topic pages below 40k last night.

I have stuff appearing in the index with in hours of being crawled.