Forum Moderators: mack
IMO MSN should still carry the beta tag.
Its been a good while since they went live yet on the face of it, they look like they remain standing still, the search is so poor im lost for words!.
I find MSN search absolutely dire for the following reasons:-
1. I can knock together a 100 page site in a week (very spammy)and can get it to rank 1 in the serps of MSN the following week for big commercial keyword sectors - now that cant be right can it!
2. A site page can rank top of its results in a highly commercial sector with just 6 outbound links on the page and NO other content - whats that about?.
3. Any quality site rich in content is lucky to see even 15% of its site content spidered by MSN. The bot is next to useless and just cant deep crawl - hence lack of good site content data. Just take a look around at all the large sites and see how many pages they have cashed in msn.
4. MSN bot loves to skim sites so requires everything near the top, hence why thin sites rank better than larger authority sites in MSN
5. Due to its small reach its hardly worth the effort to rank at the top of it anyway. A position 1 in MSN is worth about the same as a position 20 in google for the same term imo. Perhaps thats why they are not really bothered about producing quality results - they dont have the reach currently anyway, so its not important at this stage.
6. Some sites ive seen can have a number of pages indexed at one point, and a week later find some pages that were previously indexed have gone - site: can show numbers moving up and down within a short space of time - whats that all about?.
I heard that MSN think its technology is trying to learn from itself - Frankly they should stick to getting the basics right first by deep indexing website content on the net and securing a good volume of data to learn from, rather than trying to get the computer to learn from what they currently have (only a small test sample imo)
I do wonder if its the lack of data they have that results in the poor SERPS that we see and thats the explanation for making the wrong choice over whats right and wrong in the index.
All in all, i think the search engine has proven to be a real flop so far. I think they should ditch it all together and go back to partner with Yahoo. Either that or work on a new search bot thats capable of indexing an entire website and KEEPING that data upto date by re-visiting it once they have enough then work on presenting it in the best way.
Meanwhile, put the beta tag back on - if the results look like beta, sites only get a small percentage spidered, its search bot is not working properly and the results for the end user still need to be worked on, then it is beta imo.
2 - Never saw this on real competitve keywords, I would love some specifics. Although it goes with the Google algo as well...I guess that its the famous trustrank, links are not all equal and it's for the best. Obviously a link from USA today is more valuable that a link from my sister's website (which is nice too btw).
Now if we are talking crappy links from crappy websites kicking in spammy websites in top 10 rankings for ultra competitive keywords well...that would suck yes of course.
3 - I see inconsistencies across all big 3 depending on the site not only MSN
4 - not true, although I think that it drastically varies from one industry to another, I personally witnessed more traffic from #1 on MSN than #5 on Google on one website (might be an exception)
Still you are right, MSN does not provide that much traffic compared to Google of course....still some traffic from MSN is valable while google keeps your site in the sandbox (which has subjective criteria IMO again)
5 - Heard of what datacenters and index refreshing is? :)
Frankly I think that they have still a lot of work but sincerely I think that they will make it, and objectively depites their poor design (I hate it, hurts my eyes) I think that they do better than Yahoo on pure (not hand coded) searches while they are still outranked by Google for quite a bit.
Now why not put back a beta tag on Google for not figuring out that www and non-www are the same domain and that /index.php and / are obviously the same page?
Yes Google is the best so far and I which that MSN engineers would work faster to have some real tough competition out there
