Concerned About Your MSN Rankings?
MSN Engineers Confirm It's All About Content!
A recent conf. call with a team of MSN search engineers was most telling. The Redmond gang has done a great job of improving the quality of their organic keyword search results in recent months and searchers are responding.
It appears that keyword searchers are rewarding MSN as recent Nielsen reports confirm that MSN has increased from 8% to 14% of all keyword search in recent weeks.
**It looks like the MSN search gains are resulting in Yahoo search losses as Yahoo has fallen from 26% of all keyword searches to 18% and Google reports are up again increasing from 62% to 65% of all keyword search.
In Summary here are the latest Nielsen Net Ratings keyword search stats:
Percentage of Keyword Search Activity by Search Engine:
Google 65%
Yahoo 18%
MSN 14%
All other search engines: 3%
Why the recent jump in the MSN search numbers?
1) More Relevant Results.
2) Deeper Indexing.
3) Removal of Overly Commercial / Affiliate Heavy / eCommerce Link Farm Sites.
The MSN engineering team is confirming that recent algorithm updates are pushing down and restricting URLs with numerous affiliate links and/or high outbound link counts. Also the MSBbot formulas have been modified to negate URLs containing redirect links, invalid page code, or sticky web analytics/tracking URLs.
The reconfigured MSNbots can now travel much deeper and are indexing volumes of urls per crawl versus only one or two URLs per site in years past. Also the semantic text matching capabilities of the Microsoft robot crawlers has improved significantly as the MSNBots now parse, index, and full capture almost any kind of text document with the formatting as the original layout provides.
These text parsing improvements at MSN search have led to dramatic improvements in the MSN search results and more keyword searchers are beginning to move towards MSN and away from Yahoo.
So much so that just last week Yahoo began a new user incentive campaign that rewards Yahoo users for staying and searching the tired and slow Yahoo search results. Yahoo account holders are now being given varoius FREE rewards and incentives to remain at Yahoo and search. This 'Yahoo search only promotion' appears to be the latest public admission by Yahoo senior management that the Yahoo keyword search product remains unfinished and in a state of constant flux.
Over in Redmond the keyword search engineering troops are gaining more confidence daily as their search numbers keep rising. The new MSN Ad Center is set to launch any day and feedback from new search programs like the Windows Live Mobile Search (now in beta tests) are receiving great user reviews and feedback.
MSN Confirms Content is King yet again!
MSN search engineers are requesting that webmasters and publishers seeking to increase their keyword positions focus on page content. Relevant content pieces and URLs with helpful information that best serve users are being more heavily favored than ever before. Those parties seeking to increase website awareness in MSN search are being strongly encouraged to deliver quality content.
On a related organic seo note was the downplay of backlinks in the new MSN organic search system as recent algorithm updates value on-page text parameters increasingly, versus suspect incoming links, as MSN feels incoming links from off-topic, or unrelated documents, cannot always be trusted, and often lead to results page manipulation and poor organic search results.
Relevant Content is definitely the key in the new MSN!
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