MSN giving us top rankings

[brian.mark]

MSN has been giving us top rankings for terms like knee pads, power tools, cement board (we don't sell that), roto zip, dewalt batteries, flashlight bulbs and hundreds of others. We even made 11th for suspenders. Many of the terms they're showing us for don't really relate, but they rank us well for the ones we actually targeted as well. The results are many visitors, but a constantly lowering conversion rate.

What's anyone think? Should I work on lowering rank on those odd terms, should I consider that "branding" and leave it alone, or should we work on getting those products in our inventory? (For example, we only carry 1 type of knee pad at the moment).

I've never seen so many first page rankings before, but Jagger has put Google close on MSN's heels for us. Feels like I'm doing something wrong... LOL. They're punishing me with higher bandwidth charges.

Brian.

[brian.mark]

As an update to this previous post, Google seems to be ranking us very well for many of the same terms. These aren't terms we specifically targeted, but rather are just ranking well with our normal site architecture.

Thanks? =)

In any event, we're going to add a few more products to some of those categories and see what happens. We can get those products very quickly if we need to.

Brian.

[freehits]

MSN is a mystery to me, Im wondering who isnt ranking well on there more often than the other way around.
Always has seemed almost too easy, or just we are "too lucky" repeatedly.

[brian.mark]

Well, somebody has to not be ranking there. If we all ranked at the top, there would be 57M #1 positions for each phrase and nobody would rank #2.

We're seeing quite a bit of traffic from them lately, so should I try to target the traffic better, expand product offerings or just consider it branding for some future purchase?

Brian.

[freehits]

If any particular one was coming through with lots of traffic it may be time to at the very least get some affiliate banners that dotn mess up your site and provide a match for that keyword.

If you dont want to or carry the product to match a flood of traffic, that is a low maintenece solution to monetizing it in some way.

If the keyword is bringing that much traffic to warrant action.

[brian.mark]

Wow... I guess I was so focused on selling stuff I totally missed that obvious answer. Some are only showing us 10 - 20 visitors per day, but others are showing some decent traffic.

I'll have to take a look around and see what makes sense. Thanks for smacking me upside the head with the obvious. I need that sometimes. ;-)

Brian.

[dburdon]

I launched a blog for client last Friday. By yesterday it was ranking No.2 on MSN for its 2 word keyword phrase.

I agree with Brian, if your rankings are better in MSN relative to Google, then some sites most obviously perform the other way around.

[ccera]

My site launched last month, and within a couple of weeks I had number one AND number two out of 11,000+ when I entered my three main keywords.
It seems like MSN (and Yahoo, too, for that matter) ranks you better if you submit your site directly, whereas with Google and some others, this has no bearing at all on your ranking.
CiCi

[TheGarty]

I find that MSN finds your pages and index's them alot quicker than any of the other search engines...
Also, it seems to index your sites sub pages alot quicker too.

Heaps faster than Google anyway.

I have submited my website directly to MSN, and i am starting to get good front page results too... maybe direct submission is the only difference with us search engine conscience, as we are more "Optimisation Savy" ???

[ctabuk]

It's also feeding direct from DMOZ - check your site description and compare it with your DMOZ wording.

[TheGarty]

My site isnt in dmoz yet, and i still have MSN links on the front page...

I have submitted my page to dmoz a couple of times and it still int in there... you are always at the mercy of the moderators with them :-(..

[brian.mark]

I find that MSN finds your pages and index's them alot quicker than any of the other search engines...
Also, it seems to index your sites sub pages alot quicker too.

Heaps faster than Google anyway.

Not so for us. Using Google Sitemaps, we've had our blogs indexed daily with top rankings for most of our posts for many key phrases. The blogs are new (started mid December) and Google is sending us 70% of the traffic to them, with our own website being the second highest source of traffic.

I think it depends a lot on what Google sees going on for your site as to if it gets indexed quickly and often or not. Of course, the iwebtool.com pagerank prediction tool says they'll both be PR6 at the next update, so I'm sure that helps out too.

Brian.

[TheGarty]

Really?!?!... i must look into getting my google sitemap cranking... sounds like it makes a big difference!

That will be my job for the day

[scanmonkey]

MSN has really become a nice little backup to google after Jagger 1-2-3 It dives us about 15% of our traffic.