Getting my hands on MSN Beta rankings...

Hi - I have good rankings on the Google, Yahoo, and the current MSN in a competitive industry (my top phrases all have over 10 million competing pages). Looking at the MSN beta, my flagship site is down a lot (sometimes gone for big phrases) even thought it is showing over 20,000 MSN beta backlinks. I've tried to cover all of the normal bases - keyword densities, varying anchor text, etc.

Do you think that MSN beta is looking at the content of the pages that link to my site? I have a lot of high PR backlinks from unrelated pages...do you think that is hurting me on MSN?

Any thoughts?

my personal feeling (proven only by one site's jump to #1) is that the beta weights the url name a lot.

Based on what I have seen today, the beta has some new weights and/or filters.
I have a wide base of 2K B/Ls (co-op) but was only hurt bad on a site with alt tagged images containing keywords.
Other site/phrases have generally drifted today, some up a little some down a little.

MSN dance! My site was ranked # 3, over 1000, and now, come back # 15!

I agree the On-site SEO is king for MSN now. I have a few quality BL's and I am rocking some big boys in my KW's.

Agreed about the dance and new filters. Yesterday, we were #1 for dominant keywords, with 14 of our pages returned in the first 50 SERPS. Today we are still #1, but no other related pages further down.

I notice that MSN beta is reducing the weight of internal links, compared to Yahoo.

Yes, it looks like beta does not put any weight on Bls. We are showing 90,000 BLs in beta however rankings are not good at all. We either on 3rd or 4th page. However we started out as #1 on November 11, then droped into abyss (nowhere to be found at all) and then came back to where we are now. Interesting thing is that up until Jan 2 it was showing our cached page from Dec. 20, then on Jan 2 it showed a new cached page dated Jan 2 (and our ranking improved to page 2) but today its showing again old page cached on Dec. 20. They must be going through something interesting

Also seeing a partial rollback.
Some pages back from Jan cache to late Dec Cache.
Other pages as new as Jan 02.

IMHO the beta places little or no weight to BLs.
If any weight is placed, I think it is anchor text only.

I respectfully dissagree, urls may be helping you and ive been thinking of changing some of mine to push up in yahoo, but my site doesnt have any keywords in the url's for which it ranks high in msn beta #1 for handmade chandelier earrings,#5 for chandelier earrings, #5 for dangle earrings but it does seem to weigh heavily on anchor text and keyword density imo, my #1 rank in msn is #8 in yahoo. also, any help in getting my other kws higher than #82 & #84 would be highly appreciated!

thx

Yes, I agree with FabSquad. IMO it does not put any noticeable weight on the url name. I think that it would help but nothing major.

If onsite SEO is king...what am I most likely missing? I have a lot of keyword-rich text on my pages, good internal structure, titles, metas and the whole boat.

I think this is why we are all here...searching for the holy grail. it seems like 3 months has really moved me up from no where to almost somewhere, but still not good enough as i get <10 hits a day from any search engine!

trying to figure out the MSN algorithm could take years. I'm sure they made it very complex and uses a system that they think works. But expect with Microsoft for there to be bugs, and holes in their system.