Forum Moderators: mack
What I know - Its hard to get the whole site indexed, if you have a old clean site, because the whole site dont get updated/changes everyday, which I think is sad, because many of those sites are the core of the internet.
Ranking well thats a killer - It likes established big sites, some can rank good just with a single page about a topic if just its a HUGE site, thats also sad because I would like a more theme related ranking, like when you seach for a World war 2 information, I dont want a poster of WW2.
I made a site in php it got fully indexed within 4 weeks, with 2 links to it, no big ones, but it ranks on page 2 on different topics with million results, it likes link text.
well thats what I will say is my 100% info about msn
The bot will grab over a period, an average of 34 pages per day.
Large sites will be slow to be indexed because it is not always grabbing new pages.
First level links are very important to rank on an internal page. New pages should have a link off the homepage if you want them to be indexed in due time.
However the homepage can rank above the topical page and the user can find it hard to get to the topical page.
Small pages with 15% keyword density work well.
Good ranking in MSN generates 2-5% total traffic/sales, given you have some decent rankings in Google and Yahoo.
I think . . .
Internal anchor link structure or the amount of internal links pointed to a page makes a difference.
You need a small amount of inbounds to rank well.
However the homepage can rank above the topical page and the user can find it hard to get to the topical page.
I was just looking in my logs and noticed a referral for a keyphrase I just put in yesterday. I am ranking #5 (surprising), but it refers the user to the home page - which introduces the article, not the article page itself :(
I write for Google ... and MSN loves it! :) That's it for my contribution. Seems MSN is very easy to please. :)
I know opinions differ on this but here's why I think this is a "good thing". Before we all got worried about Google, how did we build our websites? We built them with a home page as a "front door" that would enable people to see what the site was about, and allowed users to navigate easily to the content within the site. We expected the "home page" to be the first page that people encountered on coming to our sites.
It's only the google habit of sending people to data pages that has made us think about other pages as potential "landing pages", and made us worry more about internal navigation etc.
On my own site (lots of data) there is a lot of competition between pages for certain target phrases. For example, someone searches on "red widgets [town]" and a page from my site is #1 - but I have maybe up to 200 pages relevant to that key phrase, and I have no control over which one comes top in google. Even if I did, different ones of those 200 will be relevant to different searchers.
I would rather a user searching on "red widgets [town]" was sent to my home page, where they will realise that they have found a really good widgets site that will allow them access to a specialised widget search where they can put in all their widget criteria - my specialised widget search works better to find the right widget than Google ever will.
If you've built your site in a user-friendly way, and searchers understand WHY MSN search has taken them to your home page, they should be better off than if they were taken straight to the data page.
At the very least it allows MSN to differentiate itself from Google and offer a new approach that some users will like better.
Incidentally, although I'm still gathering evidence on this, I think that if you put quotes around your search term you'll find that it finds the data page/article rather than the home page.
hope this is of interest
H
