Great site, but rankings stink in MSN. Why?

[chornbeck]

Ok, so I have a great site, it's purely informational, has a few hundred pages of extremely relevant content about the particular keywords I'm going for. No ads, lead generation, anything...

It's a travel guide to a particular city, so I optimize around the city's name, which as you can imagine is very competitive. I have, however, gained links from most of the authority sites in that city, as well as a few .gov's and .edu's from the area. I currently rank #15 in Google for this extremely competitive term, but for some reason, seem to be ranking somewhere around 150 in MSN.

When I first began serious optimization efforts about 6 months ago, I found myself in the top 20-30 on MSN frequently, but about the time I started seeing a rise in Google traffic, I noticed a severe drop in my MSN rankings (Yahoo as well).

I don't know enough about MS's ranking algo to figure this out, can anyone shed some light?

Thanks!

[Fish_Texas]

Very low Keyword density is ONE of the keys with MSN. (Low rank Penalty)
Repeat each KW no more than twice in description Meta Tags and no more than 3% overall page KW density. Also likes KW's in domain and page names.
Of course other factors might be at play...Link Farms, irrevelant link backs, etc, etc...
If you have good traffic from G...I would'nt touch a thing.
I might add that Y likes low KW density also.
We have good traffic from MSN and Y, but few from G.
If your G traffic is not that great, you might consider optz for the others...we did and we are happy.
I don't bother with G any longer since the big bust that put so many people out of business. Of course, if G was my big traffic generator,
I'd probably be singing a different tune. :-)
Good luck, Fish Texas