Page 4 - MSN Ranking Factors List

btw - my forum is doing great too...im guessing due to the consistantly updated content. it seems that G lowers rankings for forums spcifically, but does not have this same penalty with the blogs.

well, i dunno about forums but I do know that G hasnt indexed any part of my blog ex for the main page, its been up for 2-3 wks and still nothing more, msn has everypage on there and i have a bunch of links to the deep pages within the blog...just my 2 cents

Here's a new hypothesis; interested in feedback.


My site home page is doing extremely well for its key two-word phrase, for which it also does very well on Google - no great on-page optimisation (simple description only), but I have very large numbers of very high PR inbound links (using that phrase as anchor text), largely as a result of being part of a much bigger (global) publisher.

My "data" pages (35k pages), all unique, all genuine user-generated content, which do very well on G for specific phrases (almost always number one), are absolutely nowhere on MSN. It's a big old site and I've limited per-page links to about 50, so the data pages are mostly 4-5 clicks deep in the site.

Pages have straightforward, white-hat optimisation - key phrases as title, in metatags and on page as part of natural language.

Intermediate pages on the site are doing better than relevant pages. For example:-

I have a page of links with the title and heading '[service providers] - M'. This has on it a list of links to pages of service providers in towns beginning with M in the form '[service providers] MadeupNameTown'. I'm making it sound complicated but its a very simple intermediate index page.

This page does MUCH better for the search phrase '[service providers] MadeupNameTown' than the actual page that has the title, text and content that is actually about [service providers] MadeupNameTown.

It's as if a page listing ALL the brands of beer you could buy scored higher for "Budweiser" than the Budweiser page that it linked to. (mine is not a beer site or remotely connected thereto).

Am I making any kind of sense, and has anyone had similar experiences?

NB I'm not saying this is the case, it's just an initial hypothesis based on my limited experience.

cheers all

H

They disagree with is the comparison of results applying Google PageRank. Google has its own way of doing things. A site with short PR may simply be newer. They got to remember, MSN is starting fresh. They don't have a Sandbox, They don't have many of the irrelevant filters working against us, as well as tests have for the most part returned relevant info.