New MSN is SUPER EASY!

For those of you interested in the "new" MSN search, I thought I would share my opinion and suggestions. While I don't think the amount of traffic is anywhere near a Yahoo or Google, I still think it is one you should always include in your quest. Before the new search, all you had to do was tackle Yahoo, since MSN showed their results. Now it's a whole new task to include in your ultimate goal. So here are a couple things about the new MSN I thought I would share...

Get to the top fast....
The new MSN is pretty simple to get to the top 10 listings. We've done it with non competitive terms and very competitive terms. We wanted to test different methods to see what their algo seemed to weight more. Our conclusions were overwhelming....if you want to get listed high, build up your link popularity. Use targeted anchor text in your links and place on similar themed sites. Next thing you know, you're sitting at #1. I think it's the easiest of all the major engines at this point.

Deep crawl..not so deep....
Another obvious about the new MSN search is the inability to crawl too deep. It could just be a time issue, but the majority of sites we have researched have only a small portion of pages indexed by MSN. Even small sites with only a few number of pages will have just a fraction of the pages indexed. This bit of information is valuable to know for building linking campaigns. For the MSN bot to index your link, make sure you have it on the homepage or close to it. Links 2 to 3 levels deep just might not be found by MSN.

Well, I'll end it here. It's late and I have tired head. Hope this info helps at least one person. :-)

MSN is definately easy....so easy in fact, it is beginning to worry me. I have never had such success with any SE than witn MSN right now.





7

It will change in time, though I do feel that MSN will reward properly SEO'd sites...Microsoft believes in the power of the market and seemingly has used that belief within their engine.

Granted, it will become more difficult with increased competition and tighter spam filters, but it is moving in a better direction than Google / Yahoo, IMHO.

Cygnus

Wish I could agree...our site does smashing well in Google and decent in yahoo,
but the new MSN is treating the same pages like the plague, for the exact same keywords...

i've been successful as well with the new msn but even though i'm ranked on the first page i still hardly see any traffic from it. there just isn't much people using the msn search at this point, hopefully that changes soon.

Yes, I agree. Currently MSN is fairly easy to rank on, however once gaining a top spot, I don't see much traffic either. I am ranking #3 for a highly searched keyword and the traffic is bleak. EEEk. I also hope this changes!

Hi

yes i agree Currently i am ranking #3 for a high seaeched keyword and i can't get more traffic on my site why ?

shailesh

I have to agree - my little brick and mortar site, which received about 2 hours of SEO effort from a guy who doesn't know SEO from SOL, ranked #3 for a little while, for a single word, very populated search term that it had no business ranking for. Even now it's still in the top 20.

i have to agree with rxcllc ... the new MSN is so easy it's ridiculous.

however, it is still in its early stages and very glitchy still. if you run a search for 'designer handbag store' take a look at the first result (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=designer+handbag+store&FORM=SSRE) it's an affilliate page with no description... this is a major flaw ... google once had this problem but fixed it later.

we'll have to see how this develops. right now it's too easy to optimize for MSN and i suspect the results will get more and more spammy until they update their algo (just my opinion)

Im loving the new msn. I totally agree it's very easy to get a high ranking.

For instance, I have a 1 page site, with about 300000 competeing websites at number 1-3 on various terms. The cool thing is, that that website gets a bit of traffic and I am making a few sales off of it. Lets see how long it lasts.

I get most of my traffic from MSN, mainly because I can't seem to figure out how to get listed within the first zillion listings over at G. I get a little traffic, and my sales are starting to pick up... at this rate I'll be able to retire in 40 years ;)

MSN will get better. There results are jumping every month.

MSN is def a good thing to have if you are s'boxed in G. Not much traffic coming through in my case but i think that should change over time - I saw an ad for them on the TV about a week ago so I recon awareness of them will grow..

Since my side disappeared from google i directed all my efforts to optimize it for MSN. I do get traffic from it and i do make some money. And i claim that optimizing for MSN is not easy. Good ranking for one word or phrase is easily achievable provided that your competition for this word/phrase is weak and you specifically optimize your site for it. And competition is not measured in the number of SE results the phrase yields. The problem is not how to optimize a site for one phrase but how to rank well for thousands of phrases

To make money you need to rank well on thousands of phrases.
My experience suggest that it is very difficult to achieve and still have a decently looking site.
External themed links (proper anchor text) is one good approach.
1) The most potent links are from the home pages of other sites (not an easy thing to get unless they are your sites).
2) Second most potent links are from pages with very few links (again not easy since most link pages have lots of links)
3) Internal links seem to loose steam, or maybe it is just me
4) Narrowly themed pages seem to work best, but you need lots of them and you need to organize them right.
Also landing pages must be actively managed if you wand people to stick around.

Another reason why MSN is not easy is because SERPS fluctuate wildly for the competitive terms on daily basis. I wrote a set of scripts that collects the first 50 results for 100 most popular terms in my field from MSN, Yahoo and google. The results get later aggregated and analyzed in a data mining environment. MSN SERPs fluctuates the most and most likely explanation is content freshness (cache date). However, freshest does not equal highest. Updating all your pages on daily basis seem to severely erode the rank. I'm yet to figure out the optimal content refresh period for MSN. Because of these natural fluctuations it is difficult to accurately measure results of your optimization measures.

The bottom line is – it is not easy to optimize for MSN

Interestingly my 1 page website just jumped to number 3 in yahoo. I am a happy man right now :-)

- Matt