Forum Moderators: mack
As for why you are ranking high on msn, I have no idea either nad have been working on getting rank for my site for several months. I finally acheived page 1 status on msn by just stumbling into it really. I wasnt complete with my gateway page which was basically a doorway page that sends users to an online store. The second I 'finished' it by adding a brief about us toward the bottom and used proper headings etc , plus several articles of interest - the website went KABOOM OFF of MSN totally in less than 24 hours. I went from page 20 or so to page 1 to page nothing in less than a weeks time.
I suspect your competition is rather slim for your chosen keyword phrase but am not sure however. If you do have a competitive keyword of say 200,000 or more then the following holds true: now this is just my experience, others may differ but from what I see it doesn't by much.
-Your title is very short (less than 5 words..or less, and includes your keyword phrase foward or backwards.
-the word online and doctor are used a few times throughout the first page
-the intial amount of text on your site is pretty slim. Maybe less than 100 words, or even 75.
-you possibly used h1 tags
Metas really dont mean much anymore other than the 'title'. Keywords are useless and when used incorrectly can only hurt you.
Description tags are still used but should be followed carefully as to no keyword stuff. A natural description of your site with a few keywords in it works best.
Yes if you could figure out what puts you in the top ratings, properly worked out you could be doing much better. Alas, the quandry of most. You can change ONE word on that site and it might throw it down to completely off of the website. No joke. While keeping it stale might also make your ranking slip. I'd think about the changes you made and when you started seeing better results.
S
I see the same thing too on my site, but I do not rank as well as I think I should. When I run an article on the front page, it ranks quite well even though there is only a short paragraph describing the article. Later, when it is moved off the main page it disappears from the SERPs.
I an happy for those that are benefiting from this, but I would think this is a short term problem at MSN.
The type of thing that MSN would not like at all is a domain devoted to every baseball player that ever played, that was organized by team and by decade. It would dig down to the team level, but it would drastically devalue the next level, even if the structure was like bigbaseballauthoritydomain.com/yankees/babe-ruth/, and the title of the page was "Babe Ruth". Such a page would lose out to loads of the babe-ruth.tripod.com type sites most every time.
The type of thing that MSN would not like at all is a domain devoted to every baseball player that ever played, that was organized by team and by decade.
I agree. Right now this is what I am seeing in MSN. I would hope they eventually tweak this a bit to favor sites attempting to be comprehensive and organized.
Google has websites located in China asking you to download a language pack only because they have a bazillion links that are mostly scam websites with spyware/popups etc or adult sites, or financial sites that provide no services etc.
Ridiculous. I know searching for things myself I am finding it harder and harder to find what I am looking for lately...we sit on the middle of the high road with proper seo and good products / services for a good price- and have 0 links in google/yahoo and now, completely gone from msn.
The internet is turning into a pool of poo where porn is god.
S
Ranking is the issue. They may crawl that babe Ruth page, but they'll rank it below reams of lightweight index pages.
Mind you, I can't get the ****ing thing to index the whole site OR to get where I think the site should be in the rankings. On my main keyphrase the (UK) site is #1 of 60m on .co.uk, which is nice, and we are fortunate enough to have a similar position on Google.co.uk.
However on Google we have 100k+ pages indexed, all delivering top-#5 positions on a massive range of relevant keyphrases. On MSN it fluctuates between 600 and 3k pages, and the referrals from other than the keyphrase and sitename searches are pathetic.
I know that the bot prefers fresh content and have put up a "Yesterday's Widgets" page (of internal links to fresh content) linked from the home page to encourage it to include this in the shallow scoop crawl that it seems to favour. This stuff seems to be picked up, but the deeper hierarchical pages that do so well on Google are being ignored, and the fresh stuff gets dropped after a short while anyhow.
Can anyone who has done well on indexing, and more importantly referrals, on a large db-driven dynamic site pass on any hints about their site structure?
Are internal links the answer, and has anyone done well with great categorisation/taxonomy approaches? (My "indexable" pages aren't much more than hierarchical links to content).
cheers,
H
