Forum Moderators: mack
MSN is making great strides in the quality of its SERP's and it appears to me that they are indeed listening to what webmasters are telling them!
Thank you for MSN Microsoft!
I mentioned this earlier in the thread.
If you do a search for Nice little Widget UK - and a page has that exact term - that page is unlikely to appear to highly - you will get pages that contain the words in any order (or so it seems)
If you have a site map with the term Nice Little Widget UK which links to the product page which is optimized as you would expect - eg Title - Nice little etc, H1 - nice little etc - and content based on Nice little widgets sold in the UK - the Sitemap will always seem to outrank the product/content page.
And what is the deal with how many pages are returned - I still get the impression that MSN does not return all pages for a search. We know that a site:domain.com search is pointless as it shows the wrong number.
But picking a sentence from a page which I know MSN has indexed - eg Nice Little Widgets UK - Buy from Widgets R Us can return like 5 results and not the page which I know is indexed - stick the term in quotes to make it a phrase and 80 odd results are returned with the page which that sentence.
Shame - as some people are saying that MSN is a good engine - I just cant see it.
This seems to me to be a good anti spam measure. What were you looking for it to do exactly?
"the Sitemap will always seem to outrank the product/content page"
Hmmm have not sen this tbh I will have a look later. My sitemaps dont do this at all. PR6 site PR5 pages PR5 for 1 sitemap page, PR4 for other sitemap pages(structured so as to be 1 level away from the front page) I get no results for the sitemap at all tbh.
"And what is the deal with how many pages are returned - I still get the impression that MSN does not return all pages for a search. We know that a site:domain.com search is pointless as it shows the wrong number."
he he thats just being pedantic .. exactly how many times have you gone to other search engines and manually counted whether the results match up to the number on the front page.
"But picking a sentence from a page which I know MSN has indexed - eg Nice Little Widgets UK - Buy from Widgets R Us can return like 5 results and not the page which I know is indexed - stick the term in quotes to make it a phrase and 80 odd results are returned with the page which that sentence."
Ummmm .. ok thats just weird. Is it just webmasters that do these searchs?
"people are saying that MSN is a good engine"
I agree with you there :) it is good for those who can make living out of it.
"If you do a search for Nice little Widget UK - and a page has that exact term - that page is unlikely to appear to highly - you will get pages that contain the words in any order (or so it seems)"This seems to me to be a good anti spam measure. What were you looking for it to do exactly?
Hmmm - intresting idea of Anti spam measure - I was looking for MSN to return the most relevant page. So to optimize for Nice Little Widget UK - you suggest not having the words anywhere near each other as it is spam - hmmmmz.
Although I could be a little clearer - I should say return pages with the words in any order - anywhere on the page. Eg Widget in paragraph 1, Nice in a Navigation Menu, Little in a picture description and Widget in the title.
"And what is the deal with how many pages are returned - I still get the impression that MSN does not return all pages for a search. We know that a site:domain.com search is pointless as it shows the wrong number."he he thats just being pedantic .. exactly how many times have you gone to other search engines and manually counted whether the results match up to the number on the front page.
Er - yes - perhaps but it gives me little faith that when you do a site search it starts with saying 25 pages returned and then jumps by loads when you click the next button - just illustrating that I dont think pages are always returned
"But picking a sentence from a page which I know MSN has indexed - eg Nice Little Widgets UK - Buy from Widgets R Us can return like 5 results and not the page which I know is indexed - stick the term in quotes to make it a phrase and 80 odd results are returned with the page which that sentence."Ummmm .. ok thats just weird. Is it just webmasters that do these searchs?
Lol - What do you mean? - Search as a phrase? Er Yes, people do it all the time!
Or dont you understand the example - people search for quotes, song lyrics, product names etc as phrases. Although the point of my post is that MSN is not returning the pages in the unquoted search even though they exist in the index. Again - I am just trying to illustrate that I dont think MSN returns all the pages when a search is performed.
Of course it could be like the ommitted results section in G and Y - I dont know.
I agree with you there it is good for those who can make living out of it.
He he - Good for you I guess ;)
Sorry, G#*$!xx does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 24500000.)
Totally lost on you so I wont bother. Perhaps I am not explaining myself very well. I was talking about 5 results and then 80. But I dont want to make it any more basic than I have (OK couple of typos as I typed quick but I thought it was understandable :()
OK - you like MSN - I am pleased for you :) - well done. I wont comment in future - lol
MSN Search is now light years better than Google for relevancy.
Bill Gates and Microsoft have pots of money.
Now they have the product and their major competitor is broken, here's hoping they start doing a big word-of-mouth marketing drive in Europe and eat into Google's market share.
Back on track, MSN Search is yummy. Sites may go up and down regularly (something like a freight elevator) but all in all, if you're operating in the niches they cater too, life can be very sweet.
Googles downfall is that it gives automatic extra weight to older sites and in some cases they can be poor quality - just because its older doesnt mean that the contents going to be better.
We work on various sites in one example a deep rich content site thats only 2 yrs old ranks under another of our sites on Google thats 5 years old that isnt as upto date or carries as much quality content. On MSN its the other way around. MSN has it right in this example.
Only problem with MSN is that it doesnt deep crawl sites well enough yet imo just top skims them and also it just doesnt have the reach in the UK that Google has.
IMO its Google first then MSN then Yahoo. MSNs results are far better than Yahoos imo but Yahoo still sends most of the sites we work on 4 or 5 times the traffic and Google sends at least 10 times the traffic of MSN.
The deep index issue is a problem at MSN but they COULD do something about it.
Of all the sites we work on, the small sites 100-500 pages are indexed no problem, large content sites say 10,000-100,000 pages it just cant cope, anything larger - forget it.
Regarding reach, buying AOL would be a good start, more work does need to be done to get reach.
If they had a good deep index of sites, listed deeper page content and had the reach they would be superb and could do a lot of damage, currently they are not even on the map yet with msn search.
I have 11 sites that are regularly visited with 20 pages per week per site going up. This information is updated iand in MSN's index withing days of it being produced sometimes. It doesnt seem to miss much.
I presume there's no point trying the optomize for MSN because if you succeed you'll probably be the sort of site Google doesn't want to know.
What about this -
Create a mirror of your own site with a different domain name, optimize it for MSN and use robots txt to stop Google spidering it? That way you wouldn't get into trouble with Google for creating the sort of spammy junk that MSN likes.
I'm not sure if it was the update or the changes. Anyone have this type of experience with MSN?
Lol - my post of the year. What is MSN Search about a year old now? - and no/little progress in that time.
Viewed an interview that I think was linked from here and the engineers did not even realize the lack of deep crawling has seriously undermined the index.
5 Billion pages being the best 5 Billion - yeah right!
Even then the ranking of the 5 Billion (?) they have got is just bizarre.
It must be a better 2006 for MSN search - I dont think it could get worse.
Same experience as yours with a site that was updated in mid Dec. The site content remained as before but a few new information pages were added along with new internal links to those pages plus a total rework of site navigation.
Previously ranked #1 for its key term, now down around the 70-80 mark.
Content, titles, anchor text etc all remained unchanged, so there is no obvious reason for the big change in SERP's results.
My money would be on an algo change.
We are up in Yahoo and Google?
Mike
Anyone else?
what the hell is going on?
I do SEO for 3 sites and one of them is completely gone of MSN SERP too, while the other 2 lost a lot of positions. But the worst is that in the all keyword phrases we were on the firsts positions and now we're gone, there's lots of spam blogs with duplicate content, so WTH? It's MSN taking all the spam google is trying to avoid?
We're still good and even better than before on google and yahoo, so what's going on with MSN?
:o/
The ONLY advertisments I carry are just 1 adsense advert on each page ..
I cant help but think Yahoo and MSN are both playing dirty..removing sites they KNOW are making Google money
