Ranking in Yahoo and Google but not MSN??

This is really weird... I have done SEO on a clients website which is get first page rankings in Google and Yahoo... but in MSN, they are no where to be found in the first 3 pages...

What's the go with this?

I've heard that MSN relies more on web pages being updated more regularly tog et good rankings. The website hasn't been updated recently... Could that have some effect?

msn look for keywords in the url

That didn't really make sense...

Do you mean MSN looks for keywords in the full url of a website?

There are a lot more factors to MSN than that I'm afraid... I'm sure that only plays a very very small part of how MS ranks.

I am not too sure on the strategies MSN uses, but to claim just that they look for keywords in your URL, is absurd.

Perhaps signing up for MSN Webmaster Center and playing around with it will help you figure out the problem. Using that tool, I can see that:

1. My sites are being classified as German rather than American (because the webhost is located in Germany). You can see the country classification right on the first page.

2. Either MSN didn't index my pages with >100 links or it doesn't understand a multipart xml sitemap. You can test for indexing by going to the "profile" tab, and seeing if less than 5 pages show up as your "top 5 pages"...

I hope this gives you some new directions and ideas.

Actually i dont bother specially working on a site keeping MSN in mind. If it appears on a good position in MSN, well and good, if not does'nt matter. i have seen in the case of few sites, even if when they were ranking in top 5 in MSN, hardly any traffic was coming through it.

Coming on to the name question, yup u r rite.

You are right when I started seo for many site on that time all sites were top 10 ranking in MSN but i didn't get the inquiry but now websites are in top10 in Google and getting very high inquiry .

Here I am going to give suggestions only by concentrating that what MSNbot like

First thing,title is very important ,It should contain KWs then
Desc & KWs both are supported; description limited to 250, keywords to 1017,KW frequency - 4 to 12 times KW should used,link popularity important,Theme present throughout the site, site popularity

MSNbot not like sites in which frames are used

So hope this can be helpful to you

You can rank easily on google and yahoo if you did a proper optimization and link building. But it's hard to MSN. It looks like that MSN are always changing their algo and finding some good strategy in order to compete well in google and yahoo.

I also have the same problem. It appears that MSN Live Search has different algorithm.

Search Engines are independent and different from each other and they implement their own rules and ranking factors. If you're doing good in Google, there's no guarantee that the results is similar with Yahoo and MSN coz as i've mentioned, they are independent.

just don't worry about the differences in results. Time will come that you'll do good on those three major players if and only if you'll do the right SEO strategies and methods

I know what you have mentioned but could you explain what is the major factor ranking in MSN?

Just a minor thing I found when having the same problem...

I checked my robots.txt on Google & Live. For some reason Live wasn't validating it correctly... (for example; it errored on line #30 for me and my sitemap reference was line #40... so 'I think' when the error occured it may not have gone to that part)

I ended up changing it to allow everything, Live validated correctly and now I'm waiting forever for Live to re-cache :|

Well,you already got lots of advices.

Mr. Tech, to rank in MSN you need:

1. Keyword in the URL (It is not the only reason, but yes it is one of the reasons)

2. More and more textual content.

3. Back Links

4. Light weight pages (less images)

5. Nowadays xml site map might be a factor in MSN ranking.Upload your xml site map in robots.txt.

Well the last point is according to my opinion,I got some result from this.Others may have different opinion on this.

But at the end one thing I must mention.
By rank in the first position in MSN for your targeted key words you will get max 5% of your total visitors from there.So if traffic is your main concern then forget about MSN and put that time in your Google optimization.

for msn, there is need of proper optimization, i am talking about keyword placement, not keyword stuffing. Msn also look for good content based pages.