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May 3, 2005

MSN Search Annotated Links

Subscribers to SearchEngineNews.com know that I recently wrote a comprehensive guide to optimizing your site for MSN search.

In addition to optimizing a few of my own sites and crunching a lot of numbers, I also tried to read just about everything I could find on the subject. Compiled here are the resources I found, in annotated link form. I've tried to include the publication date, where possible.

MSN Search help pages - This is the first place to start. You'll get the basics, straight from the horse's mouth. Of course, you'll won't find any secrets here.

MSN search operator page - A few tricks, such as the syntax to use to check your backlinks on MSN. Always useful.

SEOChat MSN forum

WebMasterWorld MSN forum

Cre8asite MSN forum

SearchEngineWatch MSN forum

Interview with MSN's Web Search Team - Randfish's interview with the MSN search team. A decent interview with some insight into the mindset of the search team, but not much useful info from an SEO point of view. Still, a good read.

No B/S MSN Search SEO Tips(02/02/05) - Aaron Wall's MSN info page, a bit outdated and light on info as of April 2005, but he'll probably update it soon. Watch this space.

Microsoft Search Engine Optimization Tips - SEO tips straight from Microsoft Small Business Center. Fairly old-school and targeted towards beginners, but not bad. Some insights into the MSN SEO mindset.

MSN's Beta Search vs. Yahoo! & Google (Nov 16, 2004) - Nice statistical comparison of MSN (beta) vs. Yahoo vs. Google. I've done a lot of these in the past, and they can be a nightmare to draw reliable conclusions from. Most of the time there's just too many variables.

For instance, it's easy to see how many incoming links a site has, but difficult to get statistics about the importance of those links. That's largely the case here, too.

Conclusions from this study are:

1) Google - highest PageRank roughly equals highest search rank,
2) Yahoo - most backlinks roughly equals highest search rank, and
3) MSN - who can tell? The main conclusion relating to MSN was that "MSN does not appear to have Google's marked preference for older sites."

It's Official - MSN Search Launches! (01-31-2005) - Pretty good Search Engine Watch forum thread with tons of links to news articles about MSN launching their own search engine.

MSN Search Officially Switches To Its Own Technology (February 1, 2005)

Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine - At Last (November 11, 2004)

Two decent SearchdDay articles on features of MSN search, but again, not much for SEOs here. More new-related, as opposed to techinique-related.

msnsearch's WebLog - MSN Search's blog. Fairly dull, and tends to ignore user comments entirely, but hopefully it will get better.

One week out and here's a roundup - November 19, 2004, Post on msnsearch's WebLog with a list of MSN Search reviews.


Optimizing For MSN Search (November 19 2004) - Decent summary (with links) on SEOChat of many of the major theories floating around the 'net about MSN optimization. Also, a forum discussion, theories discussed include:

1. Use alt text on your images...
2. MSN gives more weight to your keywords and description META tags than Google.
3. Content is of more value than inbound links.
4. Title tag with keywords present.
5. Keywords in the url seem to play a good part in rankings.
6.MSN uses internal links mostly to determine what a page is about (as where google uses all links to determine topic) but uses external links to determine popularity (therefore no MSN bombing possible.) This I sort of doubt, since a search in MSN for more evil than satan brings up the Microsoft homepage in position 5. (evil corporation brings them up in postion 4.) And check out miserable failure. Looks like they're susceptible to MSN bombing to me.
7. MSN seems to give importance to validation.
8. Inclusion of your site in "Microsoft Small Business Directory" may help.
9. MSN places little importance on the age of a site.
10. One frustrating thing about optimizing for MSN is that Google and Yahoo tend to produce almost identical results, but MSN's are usually quite different. You run the risk that anything you do to optimize for MSN hurts you in Google and Yahoo (my own observation, not in the thread).

Forum member Creatix, whose site http://www.newzealand-focus.com, currently ranks number 3 in MSN for the search "new zealand tourism", describes his strategy as:

The page titles are keyword driven, alt tags are on all images, the code is validated as much as possible, created a good internal linking structure, I have a steered clear of javascript and fancy flashing things, watched keyword density, provided unique content, searched for links from other sites, writen articles, published a blog, used keyword tools, and tracked visitors. I keep doing this every day.

Sounds about right to me. I wonder if Creatix will hang on to that high ranking now that the've had to change the domain name to http://www.pleppin.co.nz/ ? MSN really seems to like those keyword rich domain names.

WebPro News cites SEO Chat experts about MSN optimization (November 19 2004) - Same summary as above, but with different forum discussion, generally pretty decent. Some theories discussed include:

1. MSN is less likely to deprecate site wide links (via RustyBrick), the way Google and Yahoo tend to. In other words 10,000 links form the same site count as 10,000 links in MSN, whereas they may count as one (though probably slighly more) in Google.

Crawling the Internet...(November 18, 2004) - MSNSearch blog post from Program Manager Eytan Seidman, with this money qoute (mod_rewrite, anyone?):

"URL’s with many (definitely more than 5) query parameters have a very low chance of ever being crawled."

Also, an endorsement of site maps:

"If we need to traverse through eight pages on your site before finding leaf pages that nobody but yourself points to, MSNBot might choose not to go that far. This is why many people recommend creating a site map and we would as well."

Inside Near Me Search (November 12, 2004) - MSN Search blog post on how to format your address for local search.

MSN Bombs & Rumors (November 12, 2004) - "One factor our Beta uses in ranking pages is the text of links that point to a page. If many links to a site contain a certain word or phrase, that site will rank highly in a query for that word or phrase."

Getting High Rankings in MSN

Comparing MSN And Yahoo! Optimization

Will Your Google Optimization Help with MSN?

MSN Search Engine Beta Optimization Techniques

Batch of decent, if predictable, articles on MSN SEO by Wayne Hurlbert.

What on earth does it take to rank well at MSN? (Mar 17, 2005) - Short Cre8asite thread in which member Travis states:

From our experience, the things that the new MSN engine looks at would appear to be

(a) Total number of backlinks.
(b) Meta Tag info - distinct description and keywords for each page
(c) Unique titles for every page
(d) geographical location of the server in relation to the user

I'd still like to format this a bit better (in fact, this whole blog needs a makeover). If you've got any resources to add, please let me know.

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