Forum Moderators: mack
MSN is on our site everyday, ALL day. It takes a break now and then. Usually I get two different IP schemes coming in from time to time.
We have 800+ pages if you do a site:www.example.com
YET we rank on page 15 (from 18) for our 3 word keyword phrase.
We rank NOWHERE for our MAIN keyword
We rank on page 20 for our 2 word phrase.
=-=-=-=-=-
Our competition? One website that comes up is a website using the same software, so the long urls being produced from a php dynamic based website aren't a problem for them. In fact they have a URL wrapper thar reduces that, and ours is even better using html wrappers. However on first click these do not wrap, a spider check show both long and short URLS (to be crawled) Could this be hurting us? (repeated stuff).
Our main keyword is in almost every category.
IE:
Red KEYWORD
SUPER SIZE KEYWORD
BLACK KEYWORD
We have our descriptions of our initial, specials , or new products as KEYWORD: RED widget size s/m/l
Our mouse over text is the same as above.
We have an article page on our first page with articles that use our keyword(s) approximately 8 times in 250-400 words in each article.
We started to build a nice link affiliate program with others from somewhat relevent and highly relevent websites (only a few right now)
Our url wrapper isnt working with most of the 'extra' pages like the links, articles etc but they are being seen by msn.
So the question is, our competition has almost nothing on their website mentioned their keyword. Their product descriptions aren't related to the keyword that could be contrued as such. The filenames of their pictures are just the model numbers, we went through and renamed all our filenames KEYWORD_redwidget etc.
So what do YOU think is the issue here. How do they get page 1 rank 1 for this keyword, and yet they have VERY LITTLE obvious density etc. Heck they don't even have they metatags setup correctly!
So - is it even worth the effort to do all of this. Optimizing our descriptions Our descriptions for our products are about 30 words long, and the model numbers and category names are all in different text sizes etc in each product. So in other words if you go into our product, you will see in large text KEYWORD: RED WIDGETS
description: This KEYWORD is probably one of the best red widgets you could purchase for the money in today's market.
KEYWORD MODEL#34234 (instead of just model number)
Filename of the pictures Keyword_redwidget2342
?
I'm starting to pull my hair out.
>0< page rank for g
>0< page rank for y
OH btw, we are ranked #1 page 1 for a two word combination of a category of ours, that really noone searches for, maybe 1000 per month. And we did nothing to optimize for that..
Sorry if I repeated myself here...it's late and i'm REALLY frustrated. :)
S
MSN is a joke.
If you can figure out how he did it, please sticky me for sure. - Larry
So stickied. No need to out them here.
That's like going to a 50 story building with a thousand different offices and wanting to arive at an office on the 40th floor section A1 but expected to arrive at the main level and figure out how to get there on your own.
I see it more like being delivered to the front door of a department store in small town USA where you're greeted by a smiling, underpaid and uninsured, but happy to be employed retiree....well I digress.
Anyway, I think your average searcher is often looking for websites vs. web pages.
Anyway, I think your average searcher is often looking for websites vs. web pages.
I respectfully disagree. I think your average searcher is looking for information. The quicker you get them to the page where the info they want resides, the happier the searcher is. Looking for things on the web is too overwhelming, too cluttered, to likely to lead down a blind alley, too slow (for many) for a searcher to bother with excessive surfing to find what they need.
I think a good portion of Google's current popularity with the searching community (as opposed to the searched community) stems from the fact that a keyword search dumps you right in the middle of exactly what you were looking for.
But I'm intrigued by HenryUK's idea that MSN might be taking a different approach, and given the fact that Google's SERPs have been noticably less relevant (and spam filled) for awhile now could be the reason. Perhaps the thinking is, "If we dump users at the home page, it gives a better sense that our results are not junk." I'm not convinced that this is a better approach, since I strongly believe that delivering the user directly to the desired information is the best way to meet the user's needs, but if true it has some interesting implications.
For one thing, (if true) it increases the importance of your site's IA and interface design, since MSN may well be delivering users in search of specific information that is on your site to the front door. If the site doesn't quickly and clearly provide a means for them to dig deeper, you're likely to lose the visitor, especially if they're used to Google's practice of delivering you right to the relevant info.
Anyone care to write an easily installable script that grabs the MSN search phrase and routes it through your site's search feature? Could be a way to get Google-like results from an MSN search (if, of course, what HenryUK suggests is true).
cEM
Keywords in the Doamin and URL's currently carry a lot of weight in MSN SERP's. Although, I am sure that this will all change with time, as they increase the relevance of off page factors in the algo and de-value some of the more 'maluable' on page ones.
It's due to a algorithmic flaw that MSN can change easily, so I don't want to post info on how to do it here but rest assured that ranking well for MSN is actually easier than any other search engine right now.
I've had some pretty wild #1 rankings for the top keywords in the niche for several of my new sites a month or so ago. I'm not getting these #1 rankings anymore, but MSN is sending me good traffic to all of my sites. Many of these sites are getting zero traffic from Google.
Woo-hoo! No 1 out of 125 million results. Although it will probably be in a lower position tomorrow, that's nice to see.
And it might explain that extra traffic we've been receiving...
OTOH we've been complaining to Google for a while about our position. We have the biggest number of pages, most current content, the most users, highest Alexa ranking, biggest stats compared with our competition and we're still only sixth for the same keyword, which puts us just below the fold. Ah well, maybe one day.
You mean like This one? [search.msn.com]
Dixon.
Buy links from high PR sites.
MSN is a joke.
Agreed. Major competitive terms are dominated by total crap results. It's not a complaint, just an obesrvation. Their media campaign to publicize msn search is eating up funds that could be better spent actually improving the product.
Oh wait, is this something from Redmond? Ahh, now I get it!
For one thing, (if true) it increases the importance of your site's IA and interface design, since MSN may well be delivering users in search of specific information that is on your site to the front door. If the site doesn't quickly and clearly provide a means for them to dig deeper, you're likely to lose the visitor, especially if they're used to Google's practice of delivering you right to the relevant info.
Just on a side note, don't people think that it is an absolute indictment of the negative effects of Google's power over the market that webmasters could even think about not focusing on those issues as a matter of course?
It takes the customers to privacy.php and conditions.php!
I have seen similar problems with MSN on more than one occasion (a sitemap page is also a popular one to exhibit the same problem). I'll guess that you have links to those pages from all (or nearly all) of the pages on your website. You might want to try arranging for such pages to have fewer local inbound links than your most important pages.
Example: if every page on your website links to the home page, and you make sure that, say, 10% of them do not link to privacy.php, you may see that page stop popping up for the same reason.
YMMV.
In response to point A, I think that G is still the best SE, irregardless of what many here say, and so they get the lion's share of the searches, and consequently, the lion's share of SEO attention. That's power, true, but it's not like they're out to take-over oil-producing countries or anything like that.
As far as point B is concerned, there are several multi-billion dollar corps out there with the potential to provide a better product than G. They just haven't done it, and until they do, ol' Sergey and co. will keep getting their way.
Back to MSN - another weird thing that I have noticed is that it is indexing my site under both the main domain name and the IP address of one of my load-balancing servers (which needless to say doesn't have any links in). Anyone else seen anything strange like that? Probably the result of some ill-formed HTML...
I do lots of web searches on my job, and I learned awhile back that if I need to throw out a wide net for info on a topic, then google's the best to use. OTOH, if I'm looking for something specific, MSN's better. That seems to make sense with comments here--dynamic content, using url's, etc.
When I use the feature that shows images of the pages MSN is listing in the search, I'd say most of them are homepages. What Rosswal said on page 4 about people using MSN to find sites and not pages was pretty good, I think. That's what I usually use MSN for, although I hadn't thought about it that way til now.
Don't know if any of this helps figure out what they're doing, but it sounds like this thread is on the right track.
Which website do you think the average (idiot) user has set as their home page? Google or MSN?
let's not send the users to the deep page: if we know a site is relevant for a phrase, let's send the user to the home page for that site, where they can access it the way that the original webmaster envisaged users coming to that site.
I just did some checking on search phrases that Google would send searchers directly to the article page on that topic but MSN sends them to either a homepage or contents page. Just one or two clicks into the site.
It occured to me that good descriptions of each article/page linked to from the content page would be very important. In some cases words in the descriptions were all it took for MSN to find the page. For example a page of 'widget contents' might point to an article titled 'Widgeting History'. In the description I might have written that the article includes South American widgeting and the search phrase was 'South American widgeting'.
I think this means we need to pay more attention to these content type pages that are either on our homepage or just one click away from the homepage. I don't see this as hurting us with Google but it could help with MSN.
When I look at my stats it looks like MSN sends me 1,000 visitors for every 5,000 visitors Google sends. A much lower percent but that's 1,000 more visitors which is certainly something worth considering when working on your site.
I.E. If you have a site about foo and at root have a link to blue foo a query for blue foo will return the root page and not the blue foo page.
This is not the best thing for any of the involved parties, IMO. Not MSN, not its users and not the publisher either.
They need better on-page analysis (not just reliance on on page criteria but semantic analysis). One simple workaround would be for them to downgrade anchor text for on-page content.
A page that links to blue foo is not necessarily about blue foo, but as it stands IBLs make the linking page win out every time if it's remotely related and has more IBLs (assuming, of course, that all other things are equal).
Just for more clarification, IBLs are a major part of all search engines. What's missing here is that MSN's understanding of IBL's is crude. For example, it's now understood that Google looks at the history of links. MSN probably does not do this. If MSN does look at the history of links, it's not as well done as Google because MSN has only been live for a few months. MSN was so bad in beta that not only would a site rank well with run of site high PR links but the site hosting the links would rank for impacted keywords. That was funny stuff to see.
MSN doesn't seem to add semantic value to the links, or differentiate between single decision linking and multiple decision linking (i.e. sitewide vs multiple sites) well. PS that last one can get a savvy SEO with a lot of indexed pages almost any ranking he/she wants.
Warning: an IBL campaign best suited for MSN (i.e. volume being the primary consideration) can actually hurt you a bit in the last Google algo I played with.
