Out of nowhere 3 of my websites in the same market are ranking 1st page for MAJOR keywords in my industry. I have not changed them or updated them in a month or two. Weird. Probably will disappear tommorow knowing msn

I tried to visit your site but it just kept saying "welcome to xyz" over and over again... nothing would load and there was nothing for me to click on to try and go in any deeper?

i am not listing my real sites in my profile. That one is a joke lol

and no traffic lol msn is such a waste

Still, have great rankings but NO traffic so bizarre. Does anyone else have this same problem.

is it on msn? then its not worthy at all

For many prople, MSN provides only about 2% - 5% of the traffic compared to that from Google.

yeah its frustrating, Im like "Wow I am page one for "car loans" which on yahoo or google means big money but on msn it means literally 0

you people amaze me sometimes...

If you put a post on a forum, or got a link on your suppliers website, or had an advert in the local paper, and this was sending you 100 people a day for example, would you say it was useless?

people use MSN. Granted, its a low percentage, but if you have a decent traffic website msn can send anywhere from 20-400 people a day ! What about the thousands of new windows installs on PC's? MSN is the first page they see, and lets face it a lot of people dont even know how to change their homepage..

Visitors are visitors.. if a search engine can send me just 40 people a day to my site, thats 40 more chances of making a sale, 280 a week, 1200 a month. And some of you ignore it?

MSN is a free bonus as part of SEO !!! It likes traditional optimising methods which you do anyway as part of your SEO for google. Why ignore it? I state MSN figures in all of my reports for clients, and they like to see when they are number 1 for terms, be it MSN Google or yahoo.

Yes, its a small percentage, but to ignore a traffic generator, be it small or not, is just stupid.. sorry guys.

[ Message was edited by: freeflyer 05/26/2008 03:26 am ]

Well said Freeflyer ... I agree, a potential customer is a customer, no matter where they came from ... you make great sense.

That said, watching MSN and Yahoo SERP's can cause alot of frustration as they can jump up, or down without warning or reason ... to that end I rarely use those results to measure a sites performance, but do look at referred visits in web logs with clients.

Once again it comes back to educating the client that traffic and conversion rates are a whole lot more important than the SERP's ranking (which is traditionally what they are chasing, perhaps as 'hangover' from previous SEO's or that all encompassing 'corporate ego').

I don't think it's a matter of ignoring MSN (though I try hard not to think about M$!), it's a matter of being realistic.

Most optimization works more or less for all decent SEs, but I'd certainly do nothing specifically for MSN if there was the slightest risk of hurting my Google results ... which bring me 60x the number of visitors. Likewise for Ask.

In practice, I don't think I know of any special measures that help with MSN, just the knowledge that on-page matters more than off-page. perhaps a lesson there for Google fans who still believe that Links Is All.

you're right, you dont increase MSN placings if there is a risk of reducing your rankings in google, but this is unlikely as they both like the same thing in a site, which is why i say MSN is a free bonus

Its easier to get listed on MSN than google for a new site (or it used to be, it appears not now), and MSN sends a percentage of traffic to your site. So, why people slate it and say its not important is crazy.

I'm not a microsoft lover, but MSN (and now live) have been around since the beginning, whereas other hugely successful search engines of the time have dropped out of existence (excite??).
Who knows, maybe google will go, all it takes is a better product. But, whatever happens, you can pretty much gaurantee MSN will still be there.. plodding along, consistently sending you traffic.

I like MSN.. its so crap, its good.

MSN Search didn't launch until 1998 - using listings from Looksmart, Inktomi and AltaVista before starting their own in (I think) 2003. The whole thing was labelled 'Live' from 2005, I think.

Excite - and many other dreadful systems (Lycos, anyone?) rose and sank, largely without trace, before MSN got its feet wet!

I'm grateful for any visitor - but until there's something 'specific', and non-Google damaging that we can do, it just isn't time-efficient to consider MSN separately; a site optimised for Yahoo! will do as well as any optimised directly for MSN ... unless you know different?

But you'll find that the crime people won't forgive in MSN is that they've (so far) failed to displace Google at the top; despite many promises from Big Bill!