MSN Characteristics - Bit Flakey

[milonic]

Hi All,

Just thought I'd stir things up a little.

After trying to improve our rankings in MSN I have now come to the conclusion that MSN don't really know what they are doing yet.

The website we run has the best ranking in Goggle and Yahoo for our chosen keywords than any of our competitors. It also has more content than any of our competitors (over 12,000 pages) and a hell of a lot more backlinks than any of them. However, although we are there in MSN Search our rankings REALLY suck. So, there goes the myth of relevant content and backlinks being important.

So, what now then?

Cheers,
Andy

[webhost1]

Do you have all 12000 pages indexed on msn?

[milonic]

It doesn't look like it.

When I do site:milonic.com is Google, it comes back with 73,600, MSN says 1,681. Could that be the problem.

Do you know why it wouldn't index all pages.

Another thing I have seen is that a competitor have created a mini site selling one of their products. The site has about 15 pages and very few backlinks but is right up at the top in many keyword searches. None of this makes any sense.

Cheers,
Andy

[webhost1]

I don't know if this would be a problem or not. For my site all I know is that we do get more clicks per day than we did last year. How to get to the million clicks per day, well that would be something if it did happen. Nothing makes sense to me with the search engines.

As for indexing all pages. From reading what others have said it does index them all, it just not give you that info all at once. Something to do with making it harder for others to copy what you have done.

It is hard to say why one of your competitors does something like this it works and when you try it does not.

[donrpope]

Andy,

To me, MSN knows what it is doing a lot better than Google. Less spam and more relevant results. I notice that for the major keyword of yours, you are 7th in Google and 8th in MSN. That would mean to me that MSN can't be too bad. :)

[milonic]

Hi,

Yeah, I made a few changes that seem to have worked. One of which is changes to the title tag.

Note that (just my opinion) Google no longer put too much emphasis on title tags because of spam, I'm guessing MSN will change this though in the future once they realize that it is open to abuse (and will be abused, of course) but for now title tags seem very important on MSN search.

Anyway, we seem to be doing OK now.

Also, I note that one of our competitors have released a mini-site (the domain was registered in March 2005) that seems to be really doing very well. Really cannot understand how such a new site with so few backlinks can be so high up - Any ideas?

Cheers,
Andy