Keensurfer
Joined: Nov 05, 1999
# Posts: 885
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Posted: 02/08/2005 11:27 am
Interesting that there's so little talk about MSN's launch. Whenever Google burps, several threads usually erupt. MSN seems to be digging out some old sites that I haven't seen in SERP's since the AltaVista hey-days. Many are of questionable quality. I was rooting for MSN to come out with some sort of leap-frog search engine technology but it looks like another me-too search engine at the moment. Not bad, not great, just more of the same. What's your thoughts?
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bhartzer
Staff
Joined: Jun 08, 2000
# Posts: 7036
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Posted: 02/08/2005 11:53 am
I really applaud what MSN is doing, they've put together some great stuff. Have you noticed how quickly MSN is updating lately? Not only that, but if you get new links to your site they'll show up in a few days on MSN.
The reason not many people are talking about MSN now is that they still don't drive a lot of traffic. Generally speaking, Google is still driving more traffic to sites than MSN--a whole lot more. In fact, the last time I checked, I'm still getting about 4 percent of my visitors from MSN while Google is sending around 70-80 percent.
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Pongo
Joined: May 27, 2002
# Posts: 665
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Posted: 02/08/2005 01:16 pm
I think it's a goofy algo and Im waiting for it to get lined out - some of my sites do just fine but some should be doing much better, the ones that do rank the same or about the same as when yahoo was driving the results have dropped in traffic for some reason - thats a mystery to me.
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OAC
Staff
Joined: Jan 25, 2001
# Posts: 6794
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Posted: 02/08/2005 06:41 pm
"they still don't drive a lot of traffic"
My view too.
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Keensurfer
Joined: Nov 05, 1999
# Posts: 885
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Posted: 02/08/2005 08:08 pm
I agree that the fast updates are cool. I wonder if speed is hurting the quality of the updates. Maybe I expected too much initially. It seems to me, that about a year ago when Microsoft had egg on their face and publicly admitted that they've been beat at "search" , and were making it a priority to win the search game...I expected the largest software company in the world to release a product better than what they released. I'm sure they'll tweak it constantly and it will get better with time however I can't say that I'm wowed by it at all. It looks like the release of a product that allowed them to cut the umbilical cord from former search partners but all in all, currently, I can't grade it higher than that.
I just ran some reports and YTD for the ecommerce sites I deal with, MSN sends 25% the traffic that we get from Google. I think that's quite significant. Obviously a dedicated forum was created to deal with the topic. I'm just trying to stir things up a bit here to see what you all are thinking. For this major sort of release...Bill Gates letter...blah, blah, blah...it's too quiet!
What are you great minds thinking?
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smogcity2000
Joined: Feb 06, 2004
# Posts: 198
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Posted: 02/09/2005 12:27 am
Just wait, MSN is a giant and will market their search so many more people use it. It will be better quality results to surfers. Google in my opinion displays alot of junk results and from my years of e-commerce retail experience yahoo (on another note) converts more shoppers than google.
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excell
Staff
Joined: Mar 19, 2001
# Posts: 14504
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Posted: 02/09/2005 12:55 am
I'm seeing an increase of traffic across sites (not huge) but somebody out there is using the engine.
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sem4u
Joined: Dec 16, 2003
# Posts: 262
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Posted: 02/09/2005 01:02 am
MSN is certainly easy to SEO for and at least they don't have a sandbox  My sites do really well there but still MSN only accounts for around 10% of referrals.
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 02/09/2005 05:47 pm
all my msn traffic has dropped to almost zero after msn beta went fully live, before I'd get decent msn yahoo serp traffic, and decent yahoo traffic, my yahoo traffic is still the same, or better, but my msn is almost not to be seen.
I thought msn went live too soon, I didn't think their results were ready for primetime, but they wanted to release early, and did. Seems like the users on my sites agree with the problem and switched away from msn, even though we rank pretty nicely on msn for some keywords.
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timgep
Joined: Jan 20, 2000
# Posts: 25
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Posted: 02/11/2005 12:31 am
I have had awful results with the new MSN. Their SERPs
are the most irrelivant that I've ever seen. Take
a look at the search phrase (without quotes) orange
county travel agents. There are a few Yellow Page
type directories and a lot of junk. The first actual
travel agent is in listing #21.
It seems to me that the MSN algo is almost opposite that
of Yahoo. Is there a penalty is the MSN algo to have
your keyword in your title? Look in the SERPs for
the orange county travel agents. None have that phrase
in the title.
Tim
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excell
Staff
Joined: Mar 19, 2001
# Posts: 14504
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Posted: 02/11/2005 05:26 am
Msn doesn't have very good filters
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2create
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 42
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Posted: 02/15/2005 07:06 pm
I'm not pleased either. Of course, I'll admit that's because my site is not doing well anymore. Not only have I dropped to page 3, but a copycat competitor that has blatantly copied my content has gotten the #2 spot! Grrrrr..... That really angers me.
I can't seem to get any clue about what their algorithm is. Nothing is really consistant based on the results I've seen thus far.
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jimish
Joined: Nov 26, 2003
# Posts: 68
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Posted: 02/17/2005 01:22 pm
I'm glad because one of the sites I had has been MIA in Yahoo! for stopping the paid inclusion. It's now in MSN and doing very well. But, there's not all that much traffic for the positions the site has.
SERP's seem very close to what would happen if Google and Yahoo SERPs were thrown together. One of my sites has a few competive sandboxed terms on Google that fall around the 100 mark, yet are #1 or 2 on Yahoo. They're all just about in the middle on MSN. Think they may have somehow pulled the results from these and slapped them together? Add filters as they go?
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 02/17/2005 10:10 pm
It looks to me like msn users are not very impressed with msn search, all my sites have seen big drops in msn referals, even though they place fine in the msn serps.
Personally, I can't use msn search at all, the results just aren't what I'm looking for, consistently, I give it a try every week or two to see if it's changed, but still the serps just aren't very good.
This problem was noted by many people, but ms still went ahead and released a beta product that wasn't ready for prime time, typical.
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Keensurfer
Joined: Nov 05, 1999
# Posts: 885
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Posted: 02/18/2005 04:32 am
I'm waiting to see some publicity and press on how the MSN search launch went. Eerily quiet. At some point someone has to at least inform stockholders.
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openxs
Joined: May 03, 2004
# Posts: 177
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Posted: 03/06/2005 08:42 pm
You cant deny the fact that MSN has improved a lot since the last update. Design, Interface, options and result relevance is impressive.
Just wait a while and see the Giant take over google.
I've ditched google for MSN.
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toddieg
Joined: Oct 14, 2003
# Posts: 30
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Posted: 03/07/2005 11:50 am
I personally love the new MSN search. It's so easy to optimize for, and backlinks play a huge role. I've even seen cases where links have shown up in a matter of hours. The bot also actively crawls forums and spiders signature files. Lots of my links come from forums, and almost any phrase i've targeted appears at #1 or at least on the first page, within the first week.
There are some problems they have to fix however. For instance, affilliate links pop up for #1 results. Try 'designer handbag store' and check out the first result. Google used to have this same problem back in the day, but fixed it later on.
Getting links seems to be the ticket to MSN success at this time... just my opinion.
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pixiestreasures
Joined: Mar 09, 2005
# Posts: 1
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Posted: 03/09/2005 09:25 am
I would like to throw my 2 cents worth in my site was formed June 2003 I see over 700 hits a day from msn crawling my site (and indexing properly) as my site is php, css and sql driven all of todays technologies in one package. Search engine traffic squat from google other then media (adsence) crawl.blahblah.com other then froogle totally different a whole nother topic, identified from media 2.1 tag. If you run an advanced site asp/php they stop when they hit a ? in php asp is somewhat similar never taken the time to learn asp. There are ways to get arround that but the weight of modifying the server outweights the fact to just waiting and give it a chance I'm sure there are problems brewing as far as this is concerned yahoo as well as google are having problems indexing advanced sites. I have read the articles on aging sites and I dont feel this is the only factor involved. As I am no SEO I just thought I'd drop my 2 cents worth in. 
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