Forum Moderators: mack
I mostly found the short output quite irrelevant and disapointing but maybe others can tell more.
From where I stand I am very uncertain of where they are going with this...maybe was just a glitch.
In the first two pages we do not need to see:
domain.com
keyword.domain.com
domain.com/page
affiliates.domain.com
on and on and on...
Also, and probably more significant, is, assuming these are the results, MSN has absolutely no idea how to judge authority/score at all anymore. Looking at the serps, it's just...strange?
If I had to guess, I would say that instead of looking for signals of quality and relevance, they have turned up the filters. The end result is they remove some sites of lower quality, but seem to somehow miss nearly every decent site.
Ah well, one step forward, 40 steps back :)
will you perform this update again? or not.
For reference, the other three rules are:
I won't talk about the competitors; there are already enough people talking about them.
I won't talk about someone's specific site. People deserve their privacy, and even if they don't mind, it's really boring reading about someone's specific problem when you can't see the URL they're talking about.
I won't reveal trade secrets or anything else that might help people unfairly optimize their sites for MSN Search.
Hope that seems reasonable to you. Thanks for being interested in MSN Search!
Anyway, you are without doubt, by far, the most open and...well...easy going of the seo reps (if any are even left?). I for one appreciate this, particluarly coming from a company of your size. Keep up the good work and dont let the critcism get to you (you should read the google forum, lol)...
peace
Steveb: Thanks. I guess the best spin I can put on it is that if we're not making a few mistakes, we're probably not trying hard enough to improve.
By the way, this was another case where Webmaster World was the first place we saw a problem reported. Our hats are off to you folks and your eagle eyes. :-)
You guys playing around with different indexes?
Good to see an engine that will quickly roll back something when there is a clear problem.
Having said that, my hope and prayer is that they do not go down the path that Google seems to be on these days, which is to say, rather than providing the best possible results by rewarding sites that do a good job in delivering relevant content, the brainiacs at G appear (to me at least) to now have too much focus on trying to deliver the best results by punishing sites that are not built the way they want.
That distinction makes all the difference in the world.
..................................
For people who read my (long) comment on machine learning, this means that as long as the training examples are purely customer-focused, the resulting algorithm will be the one that pleases the most customers, given the data it had to work with. It may still do strange things (e.g. the high weight it gives to location) but it's not the result of Microsoft trying to force anyone to construct their web pages in any particular way.
I have generally excellent results when searching on msn.com but VERY poor results when searching msn.co.uk. My site is a .com and is hosted in the US.
Am I correct in thinking that only a move to UK hosting will improve my UK SERPs?
...but I will say that Microsoft is committed to trying to improve our engine in a customer-focused way.
Just a clarifying question: Are you saying you see different results from day to day, or that you see different results on the same day but on different machines? Or even different results on the same machine on the same day?
I see the traffic in my logs, so I cannot comment on "machines". What I can say, is that I will see a bunch of hits from msn on a wide variety of terms. By the time I look, the serps have changed as the pages arent even ranked anymore.
I know you guys add and score new sites all the time, but these quick blips of sites scoring for like an hour are new to me.
On my search it is the #1 site keyword <snip> is the site.
/EDIT: No URL Drops please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com]. Thanks./EDIT
[edited by: Receptional at 6:46 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]
For specific examples of spam, feel free to send me a sticky mail, but do also send it to webspam@microsoft.com, since I don't always manage to get to all the messages in my box.
