Forum Moderators: mack
Don't feel bad if you can't figure this out, I certainly can't. - Larry
MSN is, however, still having trouble with spam - and it seems to be all the stuff that used to work on Google but doen't any more.
I do think links are important on MSN - moreso than on Yahoo at least. But what MSN does seem to be able to do very quickly is change and adapt its algo - so all they need to do is change their emphasis on links and results can change dramatically.
Justin
Furthermore, it ignores all my competitors from Google and Yahoo as well. Though they are my competitors, but I have to admit those are good sites, I have respect for them, they are also old, with lots of good info, not spam. They also have about 3000-4000 pages. Our sites are absolutely different by structure, optimization, etc.., nevertheless MSN ignores us all and returns a bunch of affiliate junk for all our keywords.
Looks like MSN is banning us. I have no idea why and honestly don't care. If that's there way to fight spam, bad for them, they are throwing the baby out with the water. My smaller sites, with 100-200 pages MSN just loves. I don't get any traffic from them anyway.
Page Rank is worth less than zero obviously. A massive numnber of lame backlinks seems to count for little to nothing. I wonder if it could even hurt you. All the sites in my industry that rank up there with me in Google have thousands upon thousands of backlinks (I have a small number of very high PR links so that's how I stay up there). Anyhow, they are nowhere to be found in MSN. I'm everywhere in all three major engines at the moment. (Though I'm sure something will change soon and down I'll go somewhere).
Hardly. They one of the two things MSN has been caring about, along with keyword left of the tld. Blog comment links + keyword left of the tld = MSN swooning
(As mentioned before I see a bit of improvement the past couple weeks, but in general, volume of links and keyword in URL are nearly the whole shooting match with MSN.)
I have to disagree slightly with the 'you are there' with a keyword.com domain...
OK - I admit to a little exaggeration.
I think MSN doesn't like big sites. If a site has more than 2000 pages, it's like a red flag to them
The BBC doesn't seem to have problems on this front.
MSN very defintely has a bias against large sites, but it can be a matter of degree. It just chooses to badly index sites over 100 pages or so. In some cases that may mean indexing more than 2000 pages, but it is still extremely poor indexing, relatively.
You would have thought that given how aggressively the spider hits sites, they would actually mange to index everything.
Clearly some work still to do on that front.
volume of links and keyword in URL are nearly the whole shooting match with MSN
Have to disagree with the volume of links comment. I've sites that rank really well with less than 20 links. Just because a site has 1000s of links and ranks well doesn't mean that it ranks well because it has 1000s of links.
I agree that the keyword in the URL is very significant.
MSN seems to like seeing your keyword in the h1 at the top of your page, and then again in text right at the base of your html.
Not sure why exactly, but it's given me a whole host of no.1 - 5 positions and now accounts for nearly 20% of my se traffic in comparison to G that gives me 60%
My site (about a place in spain) was hosted in the UK and was number 2 on MSN.co.uk for place anem keyword. Three months ago I moved hosting to spain. It is now page 6 on .co.uk but now number 2 on .com results.
This is quite annoying as most of my clients are UK based, but something I will just have to accept.
