Forum Moderators: mack
If anything like these results goes live all you need is a few hundred web sites (cheaply done), pointing to a trashy web site.
People are bashing Google for being heavy handed with webmasters. The only web sites I have lost to Google's Florida-esque-link-scheme-cleaning-updates have been sites with very few democratically chosen links.
I know some legit sites have been screwed, but BETA MSN is way on the other end, and I'd never use it to look for anything in its presently broken state.
You know the old rub on Microsoft right? It takes 3 versions to get it right. This is version 1.
Bring the heat MSN! We're waiting feverishly for the rollout! :>~
I have several sites with very few inbound links (just two in one case) ranking quite well for reasonably competitive terms.
Whether this will be the case upon release remains to be seen, of course.
What at the moment seems important is "fresh". There are new sites with are doing link popularity and they are scoring in an excellent way.
I am using this beta version to catch new competitors and to check their new links: it works fine!
And it seems easy, everything seems to be onpage,
the only thing I done is to search for mycity + 1 comercial_word then I counted the amount of times mycity is repeated on the page, top-result have between 15-11 times repeated, I come as 14th I only have mycity 8 times.
Actually, when I took away my javascript-menu and changed it for an css menu, I lost position a bit in Google, that tells me google "penalizes" keyword repeated to much, even if are in natural way.
Yep. I'd have totally been shocked if MS got it right on the first try. Currently the SERPs are a mess; but I do see they seem to be starting to zero in on a few things right.
I'm with you at the moment. I my area what I'm seeing are sites with hundreds or thousands of pages that all point to each other ranking well. They don't really have much content and offer little to the user for the search. They looked much better a couple weeks ago.
So you know where I'm coming from. Y! loves my site as I have tons of content a choices for the user. Google is beginning to take a shine to me and listing me in the first 3 pages for some terms. MSN beta puts me in the back of the bus.
Google's lack of SEO'd sites can be just as bad as it is good. Personally, I like searching on MSN beta because there are a lot of other sites I would not normally find in Google that I actually like, even if the spam level is higher. I like to pick and choose rather then be forced to put up with Google's PG-13 censorship that doesn't quite filter out all the black hat spam yet penalizes white hat SEO.
And if MSN added in an exclusion feature that learned what I consider to be spam and what is not just like my email inbox spam-blocker has, and allowed me to review the sites caught in the spam filter in case I'm having trouble finding what I'm looking for, then even better. I'm tired of getting crappy old stale results from Google that are heavily filtered.. and 1/2 of those filtered sites I would have actually wanted to see.
If you have a few hundred spam links -> you can rank well on MSN Beta
That may be true, but if you do proper optimization, you can rank even better than the spam sites. Try it out.
I completely agree with everything MLHmptn has said. Google is so biased. I didn't understand this until I decided to start my website in July. I just figured that most websites were not that high quality, and commercial.
The truth is, Google is definitely favoring the big companies for EVERY SINGLE money word. And MLHmptn is right that no new website has a chance. I can guess that it was probably easier to rank in Google when it first came out. Now it is the total opposite, probably because they have all they need. They indexed all the big companies already "Kmart, Walmart, Intel, Microsoft, Intel, Sears, Macys" etc, so thats what they really care about. They want these guys to stay happy and where they are, so why not just apply a filter so no new sites can bump them out? I have no idea if they do this, but I am just saying what it seems like anyway. The problem is, new sites can't even seem to rank for semi competitive keywords and I am starting to wonder why?
Pagerank is not even a factor anymore. It won't get you ranked in Google. Getting plenty of links seems to be rewarded by MSN though. Who cares if there is a little spam, its better than only ranking big company websites, and more fair. Besides, if you optimize the right way, and put in your effort, you will be rewarded and beat those spam sites.
dont you think this is more of a tech preview than an algo preview?....i think the optimising threads wont have a real place till the serps have been live for a few weeks....
I just assumed the results were just continuously changing until they felt it was time to launch due to better results. If thats the case I feel I am safe, since I am pretty much maintaing my results as of now, and constantly getting new links, updating, doing honest SEOing, etc. Do you think they will completely change their algo the day they launch to better suit big corporations like Google?
It seems that they are simply just rewarding webmasters who do true work. Spammers never do true work anyway, so I dont see a huge problem with this concept.
I don't see why MSN would take a webmasters true work away, but if they do, their results would have the same information as Google basically. And as far as I know, MSN is competing against Google. If they simply copy Google's results, (by only allowing old sites to rank, and giving no new sites a chance) there would be no differentiator. I would think that a competitors main goal is to have better results, meaning, the results will contain NEW sites that are worthy of ranking.
[edited by: lizardx at 11:21 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2004]
If anything like these results goes live all you need is a few hundred web sites (cheaply done), pointing to a trashy web site.
I've been trying to get a site that has zero spammy links top 10 for 2 word keyphrase, 1 million results for about 2 years on google. I've avoided creating artificial link schemes because it's not a commercial site. The site is real, the site's owners are an authority in their topic area, in fact one of the only representatives currently in the world of that topic area niche area, or subdivision of that primary topic area. 2 word keyword phrase does not occur in domain name, by the way, although the domain name is a subset of the 2 word keyword phrase, but there's no way msn could know that. For all the world, in 2 of the cases I see, it looks like quality content [!] and authority level site is getting us where we should be!. How can it be? This reminds me of why I started using Google way back when. Odd.
I'm not arguing that msn isn't easier to spam, it does appear to be, but it also appears able to actually determine authority at some level, not dependent on link schemes.
beta returns us at #2 currently for primary niche 2 word keyphrase. 202 inbound links, all naturally, organically generated over the last 4 years, from sites that themselves are likely to be viewed as at least semiauthority sites. I have never solicited a single link for this site. Pages are well optimized but not spammed.
I'd say beta.search.msn got it right, unlike google, where we can only get top 10 for 3 word keyword phrases, as well as our focused niche one word, where we are correctly #1 on all search engines. Google has us at around 150, most sites in front of us are reviews of that keywordphrase, merchandise mentioning that phrase, pure junk, etc. I've gone through them a few times just to see if I could find a pattern, but there really isn't much of one, it's a just a very bad set of serps. Lots of commercial junk, a handful of mentions of our site, etc.
However, other sites I do are also top 10, and those are much more spammy, but also have almost zero paid for, spam type links. One of them is clearly ranked due it its 2 word domain name, but I'm really not clear why that's considered a bad thing. If your site is about redwidgets and your domain name is redwidgets.com it's kind of likely the site is about redwidgets, wouldn't you say?
I think the criticism of that valuation is a little off the mark, like a domain shouldn't be related the topic area? Weird logic, I think maybe people have been focusing on google's errors too long, and now are starting to treat those errors as the correct way to make an algo. Good for MSN for not falling for that.
I have to hand it to MSN, very good job, I don't know how MSN managed to determine this, it's not obvious. I see similar results for another site I do that is also an authority for its focused 3 word phrase, also correctly listed at #1-3, depending on the day.
Google for several years has listed about 5 site consistently top 10 for that 3 word phrase, not one of which would give the searcher what they were looking for, it's only because they are old sites, and the topic pages are old. But useless to the searcher. This shows that the age bias google is currently depending on is a bad choice, serps should not depend on factors like url or domain age, that has nothing to do with quality, even though this fact seems to be a bit too much for google's algo to currently grasp.
Some old sites are great, some new sites are great, the algo should determine the greatness, not the age, I think Google did do this but now is not nearly as able to achieve this judgement. If MSN can, good for them.
However, MSN isn't ready to go, I did a complex 10-12 word search about an MS product issue, very specific, and got back zero results. Alerted msndude, they've fixed everything we've found as problems so far, so let them know. Normally I'd never help MS, but in this case I'm seeing Google as the problem, not MS. MS tends to do very good work when facing active, successful competition. It's just once they win that stagnation and intertia set in, but that's the future, I'm worried about the present.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:37 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] no specifics kw's please. [/edit]
I tested this two months ago and I was able to reach #1 spot on a keyword that had over 40,000 searches per month. :)
My point may not apply to every SERP you see. But do a query for <snip>. The number one site has paid links on the infamous <snip>. I have seen quite a few other incidents of this on MSN beta. This is a good example of where Google is in the right punishing people who buy PR9 links to manipulate the engines.
People are going to buy links whether webmasters or search engines like it or not. Even without the search engines, there is plenty of value in buying links on high traffic sites. It is not a crime to invest in marketing. Will people with more money have an advantage? Yes. Welcome to the real world. ;)
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:38 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] continuation foul...see quote above... ;) [/edit]
*sigh* The SERPs WERE superior to google for a while. Now that the spammers have turned their greedy eyes and lithe fingers to MSN, the crap is starting to pile on top of the good results.
CF
(and no, this isn't a "MSN treats my site badly so it is bad" type post. The results were good for users, now even worse for users than Google (which is pretty bad.)
Possibly so, possibly so. I've actually revised my previous theory as there are TWO distinct algos that I can see.
One with lots of spam (and one presumes more good pages too), and one basically spam free in the top 10 (again, only for the areas I care about).
The second is used far more commonly but both are tested. Looks like standard A/B testing as they flip between the two algos over time and/or over geos.
Does this fit your observerations "mikec"
CF
I remember when I would read posts like "I hope this is the new results" "I hope these changes stick" and then 24hours later when Google had factored the rest of the Net's sites into the results the posters websites largely finished up where they started.
I have no proof, of cousre, but I think the data set of links etc. is stable, just the analysis (algo) is flipping around.
Looking back, I now realise I've seen MSN (beta, now .com) flipping back and forth between the two for about 2-3 weeks. (Remember when they "updated" the results 2 weeks ago, then for some flipped back?)
Sometimes the results are slightly shuffled within those two so likely there are mutants to each strain.
They could, of course, be mixing that up with new data, but I assume they'd keep that variable fixed so they could test the various algos.
Then again, what the heck do I know? I've got no little birds inside MSN chirping in my ear :-)
CF
ps mikec, yeah the spam is less annoying and real sites (not directories) tend to show up, but just wait. Once the algo is stable the spammers will swarm like buzzards on a wildebeast.
