MSN = Easy

Google = Not.

[DariusYoung]

Half a month with one 6 link and my brand new site is already top ten for my main 2 keyword phrase.

Wish Google was half this easy.

Strange thing is, no visit from any sort of MSN bot...

[imstillatwork]

You'll most likely drop.

I've had several words on msn on a BRAND NEW site #1 position only weeks after launch. They slowly drop to the appropriate places. however, for our main web site, msn is indeed much easier to get much higher then google.

[imstillatwork]

msnbot gives my site a full site search about twice a week, so I get msn almost every other day doing something.

[DariusYoung]

Your site or new sites PR 5 too?

[nickreynolds]

I agree. I am nowhere in Google, but doing quite good in MSN Search. Is Google just too clever for its own good? I look at some sites that Google has coming high for a particular keyword and the sites are irrelevant, not well designed, have little real text and virtually no backlinks.

[imstillatwork]

One site was NEW, the other is PR4 and has great placement on MSN. I was talking mostly about the new site that did awsome, then rapidly droped to its more natural position, then from there, had to work my way (am still working my way) up

[WA_Smith]

New site that did awsome, then rapidly dropped to its more natural position

I've been waiting for somebody to say they stayed at the awsome position that MSN gives to fresh sites. And hoping they could say what they did to remain there.

But i agree with the theme, it is easy to create quality websites for MSN -- I would go as far to say if they had the same amount of traffic I would write quality content for MSN instead of Google.

[ganderla]

[webmasterworld.com ]

I know it is easy, but it is hard to get the traffic.

[WA_Smith]

If you play the game good on smaller sites they will give you a high level keyword which gets hit by 1/100,000 of their visitors, Play the game good and it could pay the bar tab.

As far as i can tell one word searches our out of my ball park (so far - but maybe somebody here could ...)

I recall when google = easy ... I am in this game untill they are northernlight.com.

[pontifex]

Is Google just too clever for its own good?

nick, IMHO is that a very one sided question... traffic is the goal? customer satisfaction, yadda yadda...

dont get me wrong here, I am not the biggest google fan (I even had the chance to talk to Bill himself on a Comdex almost a decade ago), BUT:

as long as EVERYBODY is using google to search, I doubt that this question is put right. I want traffic! I am fantastically listed in MSN, but I dont get traffic. Even with the miserable listing I have in G, it brings in more than double of the searches than MSN...

I hate that, but I started to wonder, if Google is not damn right in the way they go? Are you really sure, that they are too smart? I am not sure anymore!

P!

[Raymond]

Most of my targetted keywords on MSN have been on the first page since MSN launched the new engine. But the past few days my site has dropped to 2nd and 3rd on most of my other keywords. Anyone noticed this?

[Smashing Young Man]

My site was on the first page for a couple of good keywords when MSN first started crawling me. The past month or so, though, it has dropped like a stone - down to around page seventeen as of right now. I always assumed it was the law of averages at work as their index grows and more and more webmasters figure out how to optimize their site for them.

I'm really not too concerned about it, though. Despite having over 8000 pages of my website indexed by MSN, I've never gotten a whole lot of referrals from them. If its user base grows, that will hopefully change one day. Google is rather complex so far as SEOing for them and stuff goes, and it is really easy to accidentally put your foot in it with them (as I know all too well).

[2by4]

"as long as EVERYBODY is using google to search, I doubt that this question is put right."

Not everybody, last week my msn referrals increased massively, from about 0.05% to 0.2% of total referrals, site gets decent traffic too, first time ever msn broke through my min referral number filter...

On another site we rank number 1 on msn for a target search phrase that I usually can't break top 100 for in google, haven't tried that hard though to be honest. Last I checked, that brings us about 6-8 visitors a week. In google I think a number one for that phrase would probably double our current traffic.

[lisag]

Funny, we rank very highly in G for a large variety of keywords (gen. in the first 6 results, often somewhere between 1st and 3rd). Generally #1 for our keywords on Yahoo, Ask and etc.The site was established in 1998 and is a content/ tech review site. However, we do relatively poorly in MSN- sometimes not even on the first page. Strange...

[larryhatch]

Hello lisag: You are not the only one to notice this. In my niche, there are some authority sites
including my own, which usually rank in the first page or two. The usual admixture of fluff and junk
is there, no surprise with that.
MSN is an entirely different animal. I've started to wonder if its a game room for black-hat SEO,
or just somebody at MSN playing an honest game of darts. Ooh! bulls-eye! That site ranks high.
Quality and relevance haven't fallen out of the MSN algo entirely, but they are still on the learning curve. -Larry

[silverhead]

I'm envious of some of you ;o) I find the new MSN engine impossible while the old MSN still indexes well (sea.search.msn.com) and I miss it being the main engine. Google isn't particularly my friend either. No I have some sites showing on these two, but it's almost like their ranked via witchcraft! Yahoo on the other hand has worked well but I did have an experience lately. I did some work on a site for a new client and submitted it to the big 3. Yahoo had it ranked super well in 2 days! Man I felt like a hero and emailed the client the page. 3 days later using that same keyword search, I couldn't find the site anywhere. The new title tag I wrote...history. When I do find the site by the specific business name it comes up with the old title tag, so it was like indexed for a couple and purged..hmmm...things that make you go...DOH!

[fashezee]

MSN is suffering from the "Lock-In" effect Google has over the market.
MSN can spend all they want on advertising; but if they do not provide a "better way" of searching; I'm afraid that their efforts will go invain.

[RichTC]

I think the search engine results they produce are very good, better than googles in some cases. Its the market share they lack, not enough people using it compared to google and Yahoo.

Having the largest market share of something has nothing to do with quality

[bazzais]

I'm here in the UK an ddespite an advertising campaign ther is n comparison of msn to google. I have keywords that reflect the domain name of my affliated company which I rank number one (!) in msn and number two in google - the amount sales I get through google as opposed to msn is at least 50.1, but i can only speak from my own experience.

I find it easier to get in the first page ranking on msn, than google though - you're right - but it has no real affect on my income.

[RichTC]

50 to 1

I bet thats not far out. For our site its about 10 to 1 but we have top 1 to 4 positions in MSN & Yahoo v positions 8 to 20 in Google.

If our positions were exactly the same in all three engines in the UK i would say (as an estimate) it would be something like:-

Google 89%
Yahoo 7%
MSN 4%

Perhaps when MSN starts indexing more pages and the desktop rolls out these figures will improve but currently we certainly dont see much traffic from MSN compared to the others.