5-25 MSN Search Update

[newwebster]

I am seeing major movement in the serps. Nothing looks pretty at all. The authoriy knob just got turned off completely. I am seeing a new load of spam and overall lack of relevency.

[RichTC]

I would say the results are worse than ever

Certainly in our sectors its dire, sorry but sites with five or less pages, bloggs, thin content, sites with urls keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com etc should not even be listed imo

Meanwhile quality sites with more than 10,000 pages cant even get the pages fully spidered by msn due to its search bot crawling issues

Im looking at search results where its 12+ before we see anything quality ranking.

The msn SERPS are a total write off imo

[AngeloB]

As mentioned a few times before i also believe the results on search.arabia.msn.com are way more relevant and believable than the current ones.

It's ofcourse possible that these results are not final, but right now too many random sites are listed high on some good keywords. It almost looks like they were hand picked.. I don't believe these results are going to stay.

[Tarnas]

When I make a search at msn.com it autmatically shows results for arabia.msn.com. Those results are much better.

[chrisv1963]

msn dude wrote:
"Give it until Sunday to settle down -- maybe Monday to be safe."

It's Monday and I don't see any improvement yet.

[econman]

Top 10 SERPS for loans still has the major problems mentioned earlier in the thread.

[Garya]

As far the the results stand today, I would say this update puts MSN on the bottom of all search results. My search engine gives much better results. The more MSN and Google try to combat spam the worst the results get. Yahoo has seemed to have found a balance.
Looks like MSN just can't compete, keeps sinking money into this pit, time to fire all the dead weight over there and start from scratch.

[CainIV]

Certainly not as good as it was before the update in most of the genres I see. Some examples are:

links or non content subpages outranking other quality sites

websites with strange parameters (index.p?z=iifghfgh)outranking quality content.

Lots of issues again with dropped index pages.

[foxtunes]

Terrible, terrible results.....What was this - the blogspot update? I see spam blogs with no 1 rankings for ultra competitive search terms.

[tantalus]

Back to the drawing board. The old serps were much much better.

[tantalus]

oooops double post

[wariental]

I would have to agree. The search results may look semi relevant at the moment but in one month if it stays this way it will truely be spam when everyone starts spamming keywords in the URL , gets 10 backlinks and ranks number 1, because thats pretty much what msn top terms are right now.

I still msn will be reverting or going forward, this can not be the "real" net. It will be a step of a cliff for msn.

[Thinkprog]

MSN tried to fight some spam but they fought relevance in all not competetive sectors. These were the sectors where they delivered excellent results.

IMO MSN should switch things back to what they were before (search.arabia.msn.com), the spam in competive markets is not as bad because spamers usually drive traffic to pretty relevant results.

MSN should not focus on how to get high money keywords spam free, they should focus much more how to deliver good results in the brought range!

[steveb]

It seems like some sectors are catching up with more competitive ones. These results, half baked as they may be, are better than before the update (the blogspot update...). They certainly are not "good", but the simplistic subdomain garbage is much less in evidence. It's still there, but in my sector situations like 19 of the top 20 are no longer the same duplicate subdomain crap. Since that has existed since day one of MSN, this is a major positive.

It may be that they bungled the first clearly positive thing they have ever done (since replacing their first alpha results with their second alpha results) because of that 100 million thing, but it is good to see some progress from MSN... the arabia results are much better than the old garbage or the muched up ones on msn.com now.

[zeus]

I only like the results on msn.dk, all other are not in the same class.

[nzmatt]

Unfortunately they’ve really gone backwards with this one.

7 out of top 10 are keywordphrase in url. All crappy unbranded sites for sure. Bigger established sites that were doing ok have gone to page 2 and 3.

When is the next one?

[alex77]

we're ranking good with this update but we're not really getting that many searches as expected... strange.

[followgreg]

OK, I looked over the SERP more carefully AND I have to admit that IT IS NOT GOOD.

Just confirming what I said before in the thread these guys emphasize spam in the most basic form: hyphenated URL's, blogs, doorways, sub domains - I use to support the MSN search project but really are these guys really working on it? Clusty has better results with 0.001% of the budget involved at MS.

Is there really PHD's and a whole bunch of scientists and marketers working on it or is this a joke?

the reason why I am saying that is because they managed to go backward to SERP's fooled by the most basic type of spam which is supposed to be eradicated for 3 years now.

Really disapointing.

[dclick]

i checked out the arabia msn search domain, and it looks much cleaner.

msn should consider setting up couple more datacenters like google does/has.. if a new update isnt good then revert back to the previous results... or have a couple of datasets and compare the 2 results for performance. if a new dataset stinks then take it offline and see what happened.

i agree with the others, blogspot and subdomain
spammers/blog comment spammers still do well. their update on thurs. seemed to partially fix this, but now as of monday its as bad as ever.

i thought they had better results up until around early feb.. and the previous year was much better then it is today. I think they've taken steps backwards with the past 2-3 updates.

[Rufus_dog]

I have subdomains which target different niche markets (no duplicate content and keyword spam). I think search engine including MSN should analyse each site based on many different factors including content, keyword density (too high is a red flag), quality of links, etc. Whether it is a main domain or subdomain is not an issue. There are lots of spammy sites using main domains ONLY. It is very cheap to register for a domain name these days.

Too many talks about subdomain should not take up the top positions...this is really absurd.

Most of my keywords dropped their ranking position (as much as 5 pages down) too, together with my major competitors (large companies). I hope the update isn't finished yet because most of the results I see are still poorer than before.

[wariental]

Msndude you around reading this? Give us an update..

[crobb305]

Msndude you around reading this? Give us an update..

I would imagine most of those guys are enjoying the holiday today. They set the updates into motion over the weekend and I am starting to see a lot of the subdomain spam removed.

[steveb]

"Too many talks about subdomain should not take up the top positions...this is really absurd."

No it isn't. A top five of this is lousy results
sub1.example.com
sub2.example.com
sub3.example.com
sub4.example.com
sub5.example.com

especially if all five of those are duplicate pages.

Two results per domain. Zero extra benefit for keywords in subdomain. Poof, serps are instantly better.

[cycloneuk]

There's loads of blogspot spam in my industry, it's totally ruling the top 20.

[chrisv1963]

"we're ranking good with this update but we're not really getting that many searches as expected... strange. "

Not strange ... I lost my good rankings and if it wasn't because of this thread I would never have noticed the very small difference in the number of visitors to my site.
Conclusion: Not a lot of people are using MSN search.

[wariental]

msn can bring in traffic you just have to know what people search for.

[surftrack]

hey msndude.

while you guys work on the problems that you've highlighted...

is there a way to improve deep spidering? for example, do you look for site indexes, etc?

[kartiksh]

One comment: the problem of "s" and "z" i posted it seems being processed. Now i can see NOT exact but relevant results for same word with US and UK English.

[zeus]

ok now arabia. msn looks good to

[Shurik]

Msndude, after spending more time analyzing new SERPs I think that you didn't do it right. You applied some penalties to good content pages which pushed them back giving room to more blogspot and thin content junk. In doing so you adversely affected the relevance of the SERPs for 2 - 3 keyword searches (not necessarily competitive). It appears that now page content has little to contribute to its ranking. I can see sites outranked by alexa for their unique names. I can see redirects (www.google.com/url?q=http://www.yourdomain.com) ranking very high. Dup content filter is non-existent. Alghoug my sites still rank well for competetive terms, overall I'm disappointed with this update.

[sunnyland]

MSNdude, you said basically not to pay attention to the results over the weekend. It is now tuesday and everything is exactly the same. When will this update be complete?