Forum Moderators: mack
I suspect we will see a big change early in the first quarter of this year - as the engine itself celebrates its first birthday. IMHO some results are very good, but MSN still seems to be having a lot of trouble detecting spam.
MSN introduced neural networking into their search engine mid-2005. With this technique you should expect the engine to get better over time - it learns from interactions with users. So for example, if the network is being "trained" and you search for "car rentals on Mars" if the results are not appropriate, the user trains it by "saying" too much spam or the car rental was right, but geotargeting was wrong.
All this means is that the algo should be expected to improve with time. Right now, I agree, it seems a bit unstable.
One week MSN will be sending users to the "detail pages" of my major site, and the next to the site index, and so forth. Right now I'm getting more traffic to the "section header" pages.
The search phrases with which MSN users are finding the site are changing just as fast.
I have another site (different key words) that is pretty stable and doesn't move much.
738 pages indexed
Same 3 keyword phrase #28 out of 5,896,575
Same single keyword #10 out of 257,597
Back in November we switched to a dedicated server hosted in the USA, just in case we were being penalized for hosting our .com domain in Canada.
We even converted our site from dynamic to static and we have over 500 pages in MSN, but we are nowhere to be seen, in searches and we get 4-5 hits a day.
We are in a niche market so ranking high should be easy.
We hear all these stories about MSN being so easy to rank in, and I am just spining my wheels.
My question would be "why does this happen?". I doubt that a randon number generator is the cause. There must be more method than this to the madness. Here are some thoughts - just thoughts - but what do you think?
It is entirely possible that MSN is varying results based on whether people click through. Much like the old Direct Hit technology and certainly something mentioned in Google's patent, but probably implemented differently. If MSN had a larger sample to play with, then the results would be statistically less erratic, but because of their current market share, MSN makes "decisions" based all too often on the "long tail" effect. The long tail is statistically a nightmare to make predictions for, as anyone trying to do CPA optimisation on PPC will have noticed. Testing this, we would need to ask whether the very high frequency - one word - phrases fluctuate less than the lower frequency two or three word phrases.
For example, the results could turn up based on which websites are hosted in particular timezones and so might be open for business at the time of the search. Very unlikely - but maybe you can think of other factors along these lines. Maybe MSN has done some research to say that results are much better on sites with changin content only for 3 days after MSNbot looks at it (I am really guessing here... but just trying to offer explanations). Testing this should be easy I guess.... leave pages for a while and test the fluctuation and then strat cahnging content and test the fluctation.
If you have seen Yahoo's "mindset" search page, this could make sense to MSN. They might be running ongoing testing that tweaks one factor of the algorithm at a time and measure the click through success. This would account for sparodic differences in rankings, but one would assume that in the longer term, MSN would decide what - on average - offers the best success for its users and then you would expect the results to settle down.
Are any of these theories plasuible or sensible explainations? Or are there others that jump to mind?
I wonder if it's like a datacenter thing (kinda like google), where different data centers serve msn.com at different times, and they don't all have the same pages indexed or ranked the same.
Jan 8,
112 pages indexed
Jan 10th,
210 pages indexed3 keyword phrase #23 out of 5,856,235
single keyword #15 out of 270,865
Jan 28,
738 pages indexedSame 3 keyword phrase #28 out of 5,896,575
Same single keyword #10 out of 257,597
Feb 8,
723 pages indexedSame 3 keyword phrase #39 out of 5,617,704
Same single keyword #18 out of 261,432
I have changed nothing on the website during this time.
LOL, I felt the same way on my earlier post.
I haven't been keeping track, but as of right now, I'm no where for the 2 word keyphrase, my home page is missing, and 233 pages indexed.
When I'm back at page 1 or 2, I'll post what it looks like.
I guess this means I won't make it back to the 1st page now? I'm usually back by now.
That happens with a lot of sites on a regular basis. However, from what I track, there was an update in the last few days of some kind - which is totally seperate from the "in and out" bounce that is always going on. Rankings shift a lot in MSN, but the shift a few days ago was more drastic in nature in the SERPS I watch.
210 pages indexed3 keyword phrase #23 out of 5,856,235
single keyword #15 out of 270,865
Feb 16th,
1,234 pages indexed3 keyword phrase #132 out of 5,227,576
single keyword #14 out of 249,204
I'll agree with the wildly fluctuating serps theory.
My question would be "why does this happen?"....1. The algorithm is reacting to user behaviour with too little data
It is entirely possible that MSN is varying results based on whether people click through....3. MSN could be varying elements of its algorithm on a sliding scale to test the effects on average....
...Are any of these theories plasuible or sensible explainations? Or are there others that jump to mind?
The thought hit me the other night that they might be varying their results to test out various parameters and then trying to use some automated measure of user satisfaction to feed back into the system and readjust the algo... in other words, sort of a combination of #1 and #3, but perhaps with some randomization thrown in.
As I was spinning my wheels about this, one of the things I wondered about was whether, if they did this, they were topic-area specific, or whether they might be applying an "algo" derived from an overall web sampling to every topic area (or, vice-versa).
I also wondered, if the results were randomized and user satisfaction was then measured and applied to an algo, whether an unkowledgeable-majority of searchers might then serve to drive the algo to produce less and less relevant results. ;)
Anyway, I think you're on to something.
I honestly still think this is a datacenter thing. I think msn has a couple of data centers that don't have my home page. When those get put online or rotated in, I lose my rankings for those 2 keywords because my home page is missing on those datacenters. When the datacenters that have my home page go online or rotated in, then I resume my normal rankings.
Does anyone know if MSN has a sitemaps type process similar to Google? If they do, maybe I submit one and get those problem datacenters to pick up my home page.
It just makes no since to me that they would have over 2,000 pages indexed without my home page, but only on some datacenters, as all the others have the home page.
It's worth noting that when I am ranked on the first page, it's my home page that is.
- Dump blogs and sites with less than 10 pages i say. Im sick of seeing Cr@p in the msn serps thats either bogg related or spam junk thrown together. A site can spam the serps easily by creating a five page keyword blog with a link to it from its main site and a link back to it from the junk site. Both will rank.
- without any authority site structure i think msn will continue to struggle.
Best thing they could do imo is charge for a directory listing and use own edited data for the serps - once in and listed at least they can be 100% confident that the sites in the serps are not a) a spam sites b) Junk and C) of enough quality to deserve a listing.
I cant see any other way out of this. I see far to much junk in the serps and when they do something like address the sub domain issue they take all sub domains out including quality ones that should rank!
These don't look quite as bad as those did, but same sorts of issues, to a lesser degree. There must be something about what they were trying then that they really wanna get back to. But IMO, all that's happened is that these SERP's I'm seeing right now are half as bad as that update, not fully as bad. (I'm not talking about our own sites, which are about breaking even again...I'm talking about general quality/relevance etc.)
Anybody seeing SERPs changes today?
Today were are still #1 for the business name and no where in the serps for the other kws.? The amount of pages indexed has gone up though from around 90 to 500!
Whats also interesting is that ALL my major competitors that hold the first 2 pages of results in google and yahoo are nowhere to be seen in msn either!
Strange....
