Ranking Horrible On MSN?????

I am trying to figure out exactly just what I am doing wrong or maybe I am not doing anything wrong and MSN results just aren't good, but I hear everyone talking about how good they are so I need to see why. I have a site that is about 1 million pages or so with pretty good content across the board. Sure some pages have more unique content than others, but for the most part we have pretty good content. MSN visits our site constantly and daily hitting our site on averge every 7 seconds. Everyday we grow about 500-1000 new pages in the index, so we are growing constatnly in the index.

Even with the MSNbot visiting our site constatntly, lots of pages in the index, and many unique keyword combinations that are extremely relevant on our site, we are burried deep in the results. We don't even come up above #4 for our own company name. The sites above us are just sites that link to us. I am not talking about competetive keywords, I am talking about keywords within our small niche, but sites come up that have nothing to do with these keywords. Also for our competetive keywords, we normally compete on Google and Yahoo with the same group of sites and do very well against them. However, in MSN it looks like we don't even try, but when we go and do a site:competitor.com, we are killing our competitors in the amount of relevant pages indexed. It seems as though we can't get above a certain number. A lot of times the pages in front of us don't even have these keywords anywhere on their pages.

Is there some type of an MSN sandbox or filter that will only allow me to go over a certain amount, and if so what could cause this? You would think that if we were that penalized, wouldn't you think MSN would not visit our site and index some many pages every day? I could really use everyone's personal thoughts and experiences on this.

Relax. If you follow your strategy and work on BLs you should be fine. On Nov. 11 when beta was officially released we were #1 for the key phrase we optimize for. Then in about 2-3 weeks suddenly dropped to oblivion (page 5-6). After a month in the deep we were pushed again back but to #2. Even though the MSN is out their search algo is a baby that is constantly learning new things.

P.S. 1Mil pages and adding 500-1000/day? That is something.

Thanks for the advice, I also thought it was crazy that they were adding that much a day, since my last poast 700 more pages have been added into the index.

So backlinks are that important in MSN? I have read that backlinks don't mean very much in the new MSN. We are always working on our backlinks, and a lot of times we have more targeted backlinks than the sites listed in front of us, but still they beat us. I know MSN is still young, but it does seem as though we have some sort of issue. Maybe we are just being paranoid, but it seems that MSN does like our site with all of the pages spidered and indexed, but for some reason they don't want anyone else to see us.

IMO BLs are very important. Page 1 for our key phrase is filled with monsters with literally millions of BLs and no on-page optimization at all.

How on earth are you adding that many pages? What kind of site?

Our site is basically a site that provides online advertisement services to companies all around the US. So we basically have millions of pages with company information and descriptions about those companies. It is very relevant and unique content. I don't know why we get so many pages added all of the time, but we might as well not since it is like they don't even exist. We get practically no traffic from MSN, but MSN is showing the largest amount of indexed pages as any other SE.

Yesterday we dropped about 3000 pages overnight, but this happened a week ago and then about 3 days later we more than doubled our total amount of pages indexed. I really wish someone had some insight to our success in getting into the index, but our inability to rank. I have this posted across other forums and seems as though no one can figure this out.

Actually, on page and site based optimization is critically important with MSN. The lack of it can be compensated for heavily using back links. What is actually best and offers a site its strongest ranking position is in fact the right combination of both. This will require competition to significantly exceed your back links in order to exceed your position if it comes down to back links only.

The problem with having so many pages/large scale site comes in your site based optimization vs on page optimization vs targeted links. Highly topical focused sites are indeed rewarded and in some ways protected it appears.

It is why sites like Amazon.com are noticably absent from my sample searches vs positions in Google. This is good from the standpoint that one huge domain cannot dominate serps the way they can in Google. A weakness I believe G needs to address. (just because I am so sick of seeing Amazon.com in every freakin search)

Cheers

Aint that the truth, I am getting tired of all the yellowpages, bizrate, and other forms of authority spam.




Regarding this, I don't really see how you can have millions of pages and it all be relevant unique content. It sounds auto-generated from compiled databases. Information you can buy, compile, or get from the government. I know little about your site, but the fact that you have this many pages is not always a good thing for a search engine (at least as MSN is concerned). I can guess that included around such business information is filler content, those of which is advertising, polls, factoids, newfeeds, rss feeds, etc.. Stuff to make it look like the site is busy or important. These things are of little value to a search engine (unless they are static links). Now the only reason I go into this, is in reference to gchaney's above post. On page optimization is critically important if you have a site like yours. The problem you will run into is optimizing 1 million pages. I have worked with sites like this before that approached 100,000 products and while there a lot you can do it, its not an overnight success, its a gradual thing. Not even MSN can spider a million pages in a time you want it too. You might also have a spidering issue, dynamic technological issue with url, internal structure, linking, javascript, etc..

You might also just give it some time and work on backlinks.

True . . . the very fact that MSN is contantly crawling your site, may be that instead of indexing the content it can't quite keep up with the crawling, so before making any value judgement (i.e. - assigning worth or rank to your site) it must crawl your site. So until the MSNBOT hits slow down, I suspect you won't see much in the way of ranking.

Disclaimer: This is just a theory I came up with 5 mins before I leave work to make it look like I am in deep consternation solving the riddles of the universe whilst my co-workers pass by my cubi.