Is MSN going to thrive or whither?

[netsnets]

I dont get MSN. I run a sports news site which ranks extremely well on google and yahoo for my main term which is very popular in march (ahem.. madness), and we're 2nd on google behind espn for this term and 4th on yahoo but on MSN, we're stuck back on the 3rd page which a bunch of crap. MSN even ran a national tv ad saying go on their site and search for my term.. which would have been great if msn didnt hate our site.. anyone know how to go about improving msn rankings? it clearly does not care about incoming links, nor does it care too much about popularity, but it seems to care about providing you with lots of sites that like to sell useless products that no one visits..

[prema]

hi, we have the same problem with msn as well!
we are a travel industry. we were doing fine before the new release of msn.
we are still having very good rankings in yahoo and google.
while searching in the website stats i came across our keywords being searched in [sea.search.msn.co.uk....]
i do not know what datacentre it is.
And our site seems to be doing great when searched in this one.
Does anybody face any problem similar to this one?

[vabtz]

MSN likes my SEO methods so its great IMO

[BillyS]

Based on the results that I see, MSN is still having growing pains. For example, if your website does not have a lot of depth, then ranking is reasonable. But if your pages are deep (two clicks), then they do not appear to rank easily unless the site is well established.

MSN has done an excellent job of spidering my site. However, when I search for certain keywords that are on deep pages, I cannot even make the top 250. When I look at those outranking me, they have relatively "flat" website structures.

I have seen this time and time again, and it even happens on my website. When I run a new article on the home page (along with six other articles), my home page ranks surprisingly well for some pretty competitive terms. When that article moves off the home page, it has trouble ranking at all.

It does not make sense that a three sentence paragraph should outrank an 900 word article dedicated to the topic. I would think that as time goes on, these inner pages should start to rank better (fingers crossed).

[prema]

anybody knows what [sea.search.msn.co.uk....] is?

[cleanup]

No, but the results are much better than the normal msn.co.uk..

at least they are not geographically skewed.

[Dayo_UK]

They are the old inktomi results.

[steveb]

"The logical conclusion of that is that the perfect search engine would only show one result -- the one that is "best." After all, why would anyone want to visit any other web site other than the "best" one?"

No, that doesn't follow at all. Search engines rank sites... Best1, Best2, etc. The perfect search engine would rank things perfectly in order, not ignore everything but the best!

[ggrot]

MSN can only go up, but their product still has a way to go. I've talked to some of the techs working over there on search. Their goal for this last year was to match inktomi so they could do this in house. They did that with flying colors. Only now are they shooting for Google's moving target. They have tons more resources financially at this point, but most all the smart programmers 'want' to work at Google or Yahoo if given the option. Nevertheless, if they can do something truly innovative with search and get some press about it, that may change too.

Its still a toss up, but Google definitely doesn't have to worry for awhile.

[petehall]

MSN isn't making any noticeable ground here in the UK.

In fact, search.msn.co.uk has less market share now than it did this time last year.

As an average across all of our sites, MSN is referring between 6% and 16% the amount of traffic that Google does.

Our positions are almost identical on all phrases across all search engines.

However, credit where it's due - at the moment MSN definitely has the edge over Yahoo! in our industry.

[netsnets]

lol, so i wake up this morning, and my site's message board suddenly jumps to #2 overall on msn for my key term. meanwhile my site's frontpage is buried on the 2nd page along with espn..

[my3cents]

I don't have much faith in msn right now, unless they improve in our sector I cannot see people actually using it. for my main keyword, I am the only actual website that shows in the top 10 and one of only 4 in the top 20, the rest are pages that are just showing google adwords.

For the past month or so, 90% of the top 100 for our main keyword are listings for the exact same page of google adwords. These pages are cloaked with content like:

Keyword elephant groans acceptingly keywords toward latice entrance entirley forest keywords in low of about it and secretly dismisses carpet grass keyword of initial keywords ponderance.....

what a joke...

[RichTC]

Is the traffic from MSN low because they are still in bed with Yahoo until June 2006?

I just noticed that if you use the MSN search glass on the top of your tool bar and not the one on MSN.co.uk home page you still get MSN results from Yahoo.

Untill these results are changed also i guess the trafic levels wont change?

[Wlauzon]

We have been watching the hits from MSN closely since January or so, and so far we see very little change in the number of referrals from MSN.

We are fairly well indexed there, but so far only seeing a slight rise in percent vs Google etc.

One thing we have noticed though is that the percent of sales vs hits is higher for MSN.

[Rollo]

Why should MSN show the same results as Google or Yahoo? Google's results should not be the yardstick for what constitutes a valid serp. I like the MSN results precisely because they are different.

I agree, I'm of the opinion that there is not only one possible set of serps, but many good possibilities. I'm happy not only to see significant difference between the big three, but I'm looking forward to see something approaching equal market share between them after longhorn comes onboard.

For users, they'll have three engines to search on, no one is forcing them to stay on one engine to find what they want. A completely different engine with a different algo is one click away.

Three different sets of serps, if taken as a whole, are far, far better for the user than three identicle sets of Google-inspired serps.

I hope I never see a single engine with such a large market share again.

BTW, is MSN going to thrive? Surely, after all this is Microsoft we're talking about, search is still in its infancy and life is long... Google, Yahoo, and MSN's results of today will look like dogs@#t in 10 years. I see Microsoft, as a business entity, in the best position going into the future (desite the fact that I would like to see an anti-trust law used to break it up).