Does MSN prefer pure keyword.com domains?

[pauldmitri]

I have two domains that are keyword.com, and when you do a search on MSN both of them have jumped into #1 positions MUCH faster than I would have guessed it would have taken. Does anyone know if MSN puts a lot of emphasis on your site if your domain only contains the exact keyword.com.

Having a domain with that characteristic doesn't seem to matter as much on Google.

[peter sampers]

I don't think so. There is a keyword.com domain on a search term we are competing for that does top 3-5 on Google and isn't even on the first page of msn. I still haven't figured out their algo's rhyme or reason.

[Nabeel]

I have many keyword domain websites, which are doing very poor on MSN search. I will not agree on your point.

[angiolo]

I think that considering two sites having similar linkpopularity, optimization etc, keywords in URL can give an advantage.

[eljefe3]

I have a few keyword.com and keyword-widget.com domains and they are all within the first 2-3 places on some pretty competitve and lucrative keywords.

[Ove]

I totally aree with that, kw in domain will boost you in msn.

/Ove

[steveb]

Keyword is critical in msn, but you have to combine it with volume of blog links or it won't do that much.

[Ganceann]

Keyword in the domain would help provided the keyword is also located elsewhere on the pages that it is serving.

If it is just keyword.com, and then rarely appears it will be assumed to be of no real relevance to the keyword search.

A combination of on-page SEO works best in msn search but regarding google it is completely different in what they consider keywords.

Msn appears to give more weight to on-page seo than both yahoo and google. My estimations are about 60/40 for msn for on-page SEO / off-page SEO by msn, 50/50 for Yahoo on-page/off-page seo and 40/60 for google on-page/off-page seo.

However, in saying that with google redoing how they handle off page linking it maybe they give a higher value now to relevant off-page SEO and pay little to no attention to the actual page contents - that is what I am seeing in search results pages, less and less relevance to the keyword search by google to on-page content and more towards junk that is not related.

Msn, by applying relevancy of pages via on-page SEO to keyword search is starting to prove a lot more effective in bringing up relevant pages that are actually useful for my searches. I am not sure if they have changed recently or not on how they handle things as I have just recently got into this and obviously it is only my short-term experience so far, patterns may change in the long term.