Forum Moderators: mack
Until I stopped looking for my pages and really started looking at the results I was getting for my keywords...NOT EVEN CLOSE. Little to No relevance.
Looking for blue widgets in North Shores Florida...getting used car lots in North Chicago, or pet grooming in North Carolina.
So, if you've lost pages or placement...relax (it's probably not your site) and wait for the bugs to get worked out.
Surely MSN is working on this...
If you are experiencing the same or have comments, please post.
I'd like to know it's not just me... :-) Fish
Do a search now on msn and tell me they have quality serps. Tosh!
They are so far away currently they are a write off.
Yes, the three points you make about spam being autogenerated pages, the blogger look etc etc are fair enough, kind of boarders on my point about "Junk" rather than "Spam" but msn ARE NOT ahead of the game.
In a few select search requests you may strike lucky but unless the keyword is in the domain name they cant tell what the page is. And less is more is a REAL problem.
You tell me why a three page site with little content "My-blue-widgets.com" should rank top of the serps for "blue wigdets" over a site packed with content with a dedicated section of pages about "Blue widgets" simply because, less is more!. This is what we currently see in msn.co.uk and now we know why!
The UK msn serps are utter plain garbage and if anyone wants to sticky me examples of Uk serps in msn where you think they have got it right then i set you the challenge -
Anyone that has done a Uk search on msn and rates what it returns please sticky me - im yet to see ANY search produce anything even 20% on target, thats how poor i am finding msn currently!
You will forgive me for pointing this out I hope ... but at no time did I say MSN was "ahead of the game". I said they are headed in the right direction.
They are not there YET ... but things are looking up in my opinion. MSN only launched their own search engine a year and a half ago. Only recently have they begun to make (serious) efforts to improve their search quality. Give them some time to work out the kinks!
Anyone that has done a Uk search on msn and rates what it returns please sticky me - im yet to see ANY search produce anything even 20% on target, thats how poor i am finding msn currently!
BUT according to MSNDude, the last Friday update caused minimal harm...so they have no intention to undo it. That's not good news...
As for me, I find the search results more than lacking in revelance compared to Y & G.
Looking for blue widgets in North Carolina and you end up with North Chicago used car lots.
Hopefully, MSNDude will take another look at the last update.
Second, redirection spam is a serious, serious issue and we're working hard on it. Unfortunately, it is not an easy problem -- otherwise we'd have fixed it by now.
Third, when I say "less is more," I'm talking about "on a single page." The reason I'm talking about single pages here is that, although the algorithm looks at lots of other features, all of the examples I've seen of non-spam that it called spam could be fixed purely by cleaning up one or two single pages.
Finally, despite what anyone might believe :-) this really is an automated process. It's a neural net trained from hand-labeled examples -- not a team of humans doing manual labeling.
(By the way, I'm flying back to Seattle from SES today -- or trying to. Wish me luck.)
I am curious to see how this algo update pans out.
I have also had problems with this update. Top five results to page three. My site has been around for six years and is not spammy.
Jimville - what I'm saying to webmasters is this - if you're creating the site, you probably have a pretty good idea if you're spamming a search engine. Of course we all use keyphrases, but my guide is this - if the average Joe were to read the page would they feel I was repeating a phrase needlessly? Natural writing style, natural linking - when you cross from the line, then you're probably spamming to some degree.
As far as spotting spam, that is much harder to do because you need to consider both on-page and off-page factors. Some are quite obvious through simple visual inspection of a page, others quite sophisticated.
I sent MSNDude an example of what I thought was spam about a month ago. This involved multiple web sites pointing back to a single website. This particular webmaster owned 8 of the top 10 positions for this phrase. By looking at each site, you might not notice the problem, but it was their association (the fact they were all owned by one entitiy) that made them spam.
when you say "single page"
are you saying that if a single page is "spammy" then it can affect an entire site? or that the antispam part of the algo only affects individual pages.
thanks.
obvious affiliate link on otherwise clean sites? [eh, maybe]
too dense KW usage on one page? [not that I can tell]
ton of incoming, over-optimized anchor text? [nope]
MSNDude, would you be able to elaborate a bit more about what types of small issues to avoid for those single page fixes? For the most part, I think we might just be overlooking them without knowing we're doing something undesired (even sites built for users in mind: navigation, information, purchasing assistance, etc). I'd like to think that a little knowledge for us partners might help make it easier to track down obvious spam, with tell collateral damage.
I hope you didn't try to smuggle any dihydrogen oxide on the plane; that's a no no today.
Cygnus
Nice to see you at the Google Party and really enjoyed being in on your conversation with ... GoogleGuy! Hope to see more of you at November's Las Vegas WebmasterWorld if the neural network let's you out of the box.
ps: hope u caught your flight ok
On search.msn.co.uk we can see results before update.
I tryed to compare them with results from search.msn.com.
Looks like it something about outbound links on a page.
Most penalyzed pages contain several links to other domains.
Probably removing those links could help.
It will take a few more months yet imo, but the search will become less and less relevent as it favours more and more low content pages and junk that it thinks are OK
You can at least rank for at least one term "blue Widgets" as long as your domain name includes the term or you have it as a sub domain with a few blog links to it.
Due to the serps being less and less relevent with every update i have to say my confidence in msn getting this right now and being a real challenge to google is at an all time low. I just feel they are going in totally the wrong direction but cant see that they are!
After much research within my site, I find the pages that are holding placement have the Meta Tag Description Keywords inserted no more than 2 times, with lesser Keywords 1 time.
Also, INDIVIDUAL Body Keywords are 3% with lesser keywords 2% and 1%...
and get this, overall body keyword density is "0"
As MSNDude says...Less is More.
I've not tested this on my affected pages, but will do so today and post results.
Suggest you do the same and keep us posted.
Fish Texas...
The UK results are especially bad. Unfortunately I relied on MSN and Yahoo for traffic and they have both undergone substantial algo changes in the UK where relevancy has been pushed to one side.
I have gone down about 25 results down to page 3. This appears to be sitewide.
Same here. Home page fell from top position to page 3. Other internal pages now rank higher than home page. This only happens on msn.com, not on msn.co.uk, msn.be, msn.nl, ...
Page 3 seems to be a special page!
[edited by: FromBelgium at 5:03 pm (utc) on Aug. 11, 2006]
I am real curious about this since my site is not spammy.
My previous post was just meant if your primary concern is optimising for MSN.
They won't give out specifics; because they just want us to build 'informative, user-friendly sites' that will get ranked naturally since they are so informative and user-friendly!
So we gotta figure it out for ourselves :)
or am I wrong webmasters? would you just leave your site
suffer it's penalties if you knew for certain what was
triggerring them, or would you make a serious effort to correct them.
Yahoo also moved up changing the onsite optimization.
Its all about links, title, domain name, content has been downgraded, kw density under 4%
The less optimized the better. age of links, not exact matches on blinks.
I know all the seos will knock this, but proof is in the puddy.....
Failing that, let me just repeat that the best thing any webmaster can do is update his/her site to benefit the end-user. That adds value that you get to keep no matter what changes happen in any of the search engines.
