Forum Moderators: mack
One of my sites was also removed, but a couple of days ago it started back again, and today it's back to it's previous MSN SERP's before this happened.
Conclusion: Google sux.
I have one other domain that is two years old and it is #2 for it's keyword.
My sites provide free info and resources, mainly of an educational nature. The pages are about what they say they are about. I don't think that they can be called spam by any stretch of the imagination (except in Google's imagination where my pages don't even exist, while scrapers with my snippets are listed by thousand).
I use keywords in titles, text and URLs. Good to see these pages indexed properly for a change.
Number 1 in Yahoo also... nowhere to be seen in G tho :(
Cant believe it, just when then almost had it right they do this. Amazing.
In my sector the top sites including mine rank way under all the dross at the top for the main keywords. In the sectors where our site ranks high, its for our static pages that are less relevent to the search term rather than our dynamic pages which are updated on a regular basis and are rich in the search term content
As long as the keyword is in the address it ranks well add to that 3 times in the title and 18 times in your meta description and you have a number 1 slot.
Anyone that wants to do this for MSN will drop from Google hence why those now ranking in MSN dont in Google.
I wish i could quote examples here but the top 10 in my sector is so far off the mark its untrue. The sites are not even remotely in line with the search term, In one case a web design company that has a page with a title starting with the keyword followed by the name of the site ranks top for the search term yet the page content has nothing to do with it other than they design sites for sites about the keyword!
In another example the number 3 is a cloaked page full of keyword links that re-directs and the number 4 is a keyword 3 times tile with the keyword 18 times in a row from the meta description and the address is keywordsite.com/keyword
MSN certainly have different results, but if they think producing a pile of cr@p is the answer then MSN search is going to be very short lived
Where is MSNGuy? Maybe someone should come and join this thread from MSN and give us a little explanation as to the thought process behind the algo that has given us these rather unsavoury results. I am sure there must be a lot of different sectors that are seeing odd results.
Saying that, fair play to the spammers who are at No1.
They must think it's their lucky day what with all the other SE's trying to get rid of the spam and scraped sites.
Ska
We did roll out a new update this past week which includes a number of significant algorithmic changes as well as new functionality.
Some of the highlights of the new functionality:
* Lots of new operators to probe the index. If you look at this post: [blogs.msdn.com...] you will see them at the bottom.
* Local Search functionality. This allows you to search for businesses and people. This is US only right now. Try it out at [search.msn.com...] and send us feedback!
* Changes to how we crawl sites and to our ranking. The index will likely be shifting a little bit for the next few weeks as this trickles through the system. We realize that some folks are going to be happy with the results and some might not be as happy, however, overall we think that the new results are improved. You all will be the ultimate judges of that!
-msndude
p.s. Some shameless self promotion: a lot of people do not know about the Search Builder. Check out the blog post on it to learn more about it: [blogs.msdn.com...]
Wiki's deliver more visitors than MSN in my sector!
A shame, as I would love to see G's stranglehold broken
The search builder results ranking slider bars are very interesting - thanks for posting the link!
to echo phantombookman - and then there was silence... i.e. very few referrers.
Also, another site got a visit from user in Redmond - and it is not a very popular site. is that a human editor by chance?
Also still amzed that the thing we thought wouldn't be a problem, crawling, is one area where MSN is objectively far worse than Google and Yahoo.
I feel good about all my high-quality well-written content-rich pages getting well placed, but guilty that all these spammerific stubs are also getting sweet rankage. It does seem like
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">please don't flame me
kw 38721.55%1
(100.0%)0
(0.0%)0
(0.0%)0
(0.0%)0
(0.0%)0
(0.0%)0
(0.0%)
kw1035277.83%1
(30.0%)6
(6.0%)7
(21.0%)2
(7.4%)4
(33.3%)4
(10.3%)0
(0.0%)
Also still amzed that the thing we thought wouldn't be a problem, crawling, is one area where MSN is objectively far worse than Google and Yahoo.
I've had just the opposite experience. MSN appears to crawl better than any other bot. This is for a site of roughly 900 pages. Yahoo gets the award for most active bot, but also returns the fewest pages in their index (650).
Will the results be more stable once this update is overwith? I am not talking about moving from positon 3 to 5 and then back. What I am talking about is moving from page 1 to page 3 and then back within a couple of weeks.
MSN appears to crawl better than any other bot.
Same here. Msn absolutely gobbles up our forum posts just about as fast as they're made. Google's full site crawl is roughly twice monthly (freshbot hits our front page everyday though).
New MSN algo/mix looks pretty good in the hlaf dozen or so secotrs I'm watching. Still quite a bit of adsense scraper spam, but it olooks to have lessoned a bit (no thanks to google for elminating not adsense spammers).
It is easy to get stuck in the cycle of evaluating a search engine and deeming it good or by where your own sites appear in the rankings. But I must say that even though our site doesn't always rank #1 for some keywords, it seems those ranking above us have a good reason to be there.
Our own site ranks well in msn but the other sites listed are dire. I can show various examples of pure spam sites, cloaked pages with re-directs and plenty of sites that should feature that dont.
In addition to this msns new algo clearly favours static pages over dynamic. The static pages with a bit of on toppic information on our own site but with /keyword.html in the address rank higher than our search term content rich pages that are dynamic that dont have the keyword in the address.
Quality sites that are branded names but not keyword names rank lower than the sites that use keyword in the address line.
When MSN started out i genuinely thought that content was king, the previous results were not bad. Now its clear that content doesnt count - high on page keyword usage rules the day, spam wins, msn is no longer interested in site content just if the keyword features enough in those three areas, Title, address, meta.
Sites that rank well in msn contain the keyword at least once in the title (but three times is better), 18 times in the meta description, more the better and at least once in the address line.
Spam city if you ask me
Oh and as for spidering, sorry but MSN is hopeless compared to Google and Yahoo, it skims the top of sites rating content one deep from the home page as priority.
Our own site has over 400,000 pages, Google has indexed over 90% of it, Yahoo about 40% and MSN not even 1% yet despite us having over 8000 links to the site.
Sorry but i guess msn works for you if you carry a few site pages and you spam them with the keyword you want to push.
Google have absolutely nothing to worry about, oh and if MSN dude reads this may i suggest that your team work on getting your SERPS right before moving onto other product services because at the current rate i cant see many switching over to msn with these search results. I can provide some great examples of how bad your serps currently are if you are interested .
I second that. Msn search is spam city.
Very significant improvements in some obvious ways, like words in the URL to the right of the tld seem to be valued at least in the ballpark of words to the left of the tld. Of course, that shouldn't be some mega-important algo factor in any case, but at least the playing field is more level, and large authority domains are doing much better in the battle with key-word.subdomain.tld trash.
MSN's challenge right now (besides much further reversing the dopey geolocation nonsense) is to clean out the blatantly obvious, zero-signals-of-quality trash. Sadly, MSN has been driven by poor conceptual thinking, focusing on "relevance" (hence the keywords left of the tld fetish) rather than "quality". Just establish a quality bar even two inches off the floor, and most of the pure trash would be gone, and then, the results would be competitive, and MSN might actually give the staggering googlebeast a run for its money. At this point though, all they can merit is an "improving beta search engine" tag.
When I first read the description of what you were seeing on MSN it made me stop...that is what I get when using the Google search. We were once #1 for MANY keywords and now only rank for a few. The sites that rank above ours now are the homemade, new to webdesign sites (back to basics I guess).... I can type in our name and the sites that link to us come up before we do.
"Editor's Note: Recently, MSN Search announced they would be integrating a new method for determining result relevance. In fact, the developers said they were obsessed with providing the most relevant results they can. Whenever a new algorithm is introduced, it changes how sites get ranked. Have any of you noticed anything different about MSN Search since they introduced the Neural Net?"
[edited by: rogerd at 3:33 am (utc) on July 14, 2005]
[edit reason] No unlinked or spelled-out URLs, please [/edit]
Thanks for stopping by. Would it be too much to ask for you to maybe give us a quick run down of the thought process behind the current update. I am not asking for specifics just a brief post before this ends up as another speculative nightmare like the 'bourbon' thread. Webmasters are grumbling about Google as you well know. Maybe you could get in quick before another 700+ post thread about how useless your search engine is ;oP
Thanks
Ska
