Forum Moderators: mack
We are talking about a big sector!
I'm in southern California...
I see it too. I don't get a lot of traffic from MSN, but it's trippled starting yesterday (Monday).
I also noticed an unusally large increase for me when doing the site: search. For some reason, MSN has about 400 pages too many. My site serves the financial information sector.
Initial observations:
- On-page factors seem to be more important now.
- The 'quantity of links' knob has been turned down a little.
- Still doesn't like ranking deeper pages (e.g. for "cheap widget X400" it prefers www.example.com/widgets/index.html to www.example.com/widgets/widget-x400.html).
One travel sector search I check regularly shows the SAME scraper page duplicated on 4 different domains in the top 10. The exact same page.
But the kicker is that the scraper didn't even scrap the correct keyword --for a travel term (foo city hotels) it scraped women's cosmetics/student loans/weight loss/etc!
P...U
...[holding nose]...
I have a few hundred newish domains that still didn't get picked up. =/ shoooot.
But i did gain a few great #1's. One is a very big SoAm countries name!
So mostly I'd say I improved. But I am glass half full kinda guy. I've lost a small amount of traffic in my big sites (7% overall down to 5.5%) But picked it up on many of the smaller ones.
Just wish they'd added more to their index. Looks like just a shuffle.
Any experiencing new sites added?
The results are massively different for me - thankfully for the better. Fresh too - because they are listing pages that have tracking urls put erronously on some pages - which were only online for under a weak, less than two weeks ago. Sadly hijacking my own pages! (Doh!). Bug to fix there... Hopefully 301s will kick in soon to fixd that.
It looks like the UK index has (is?) updating at the same time.
So - is it an update that is done and dusted, or do we have an MSNdance for the next day or two?
while your at it, can you ask why MSN "force feeds" local/country results - instead of offering opt-in?
check the differences between
- [search.msn.uk...]
and
- [search.msn.com...]
Why is MSN displaying meta keywords?
[search.msn.co.uk...]
- keywords in title are important ( 3 to 5 keywords )
- keyword order in title is important
- keyword in URL are important
Sites that used to rank fine just using thousand of internal links pages, are lowering their rank..
For example few days ago several sites having a Dmoz clone in their site, with additonal links to increase the number of internal links, had a good rank: now, no way....
I fear the bigger numbers are thus just baloney since sites under 250 pages are still usually poorly indexed.
Some scattered clear improvements, but in general still an abysmal search engine overrun with subdomain garbage (when nobody cares to spam blogs with this subdomain trash the results for such searches are decent).
Top skim of websites, very little deep crawling. If the title, meta description and domain address include the keywords it ranks high.
In my sector the top 20 all include the keyword in the address. On our own site the pages rich in content about the keyword have fallen back and out of depths MSN list other pages on our site that didnt previously feature, that have less information but include /widget in the page address - just proves the point.
The number one position is a site with the key word three times in the title, 14 times in the meta description and once in the address line.
Number two position is a spam page with a re-direct to the sites home page.
Spam rules OK now at MSN - they should put them back to how they were previously the results were much better imo
The number one position is a site with the key word three times in the title, 14 times in the meta description and once in the address line.
Not to mention the fact that most of the top10 results in my niche are occupied by domains-that-have-way-too-many-dashes-in-the-name.com
Hope this udpate doesn't stick.
