|
As many of you may know, Fredrick Marckini is the founder
and CEO of iProspect.com, one of the country's leading search
engine positioning companies.
These interviews were conducted in the course of writing
his newest book,"Search Engine Positioning." The
450+ page "mega" book (the most comprehensive resource
I've ever seen on the topic) will be in bookstores in May.
The new book "Search Engine Positioning" can be
preordered at Amazon.com.
Information gained from these interviews will be presented
in the book's "how-to" engine-by-engine chapters.
The interview with a "Lead Program Manager" of
MSN was fairly long, but I'll try to condense it down into
information that I believe you'll find useful. First, it's
important to understand how MSN works before you can effectively
promote your Web site there.
MSN combines results from four distinct sources:
1. Popular Search Topics (DirectHit)
2. Featured Sites (MSN reviewed sites)
3. Web Directory Sites (Looksmart)
4. Web Pages (Inktomi)
MSN Popular Search Topics (DirectHit)
The Popular Search Topic links are in a separate area at the
top of the page and are pulled from DirectHit.com. Up to four
links will be displayed and only for the more popular search
terms.
DirectHit ranks pages based on content first, and then they
start assigning popularity ratings to pages by measuring how
often people click on the listing and how long they stay at
the site. The score is then adjusted based on the current
ranking of the page so that sites further down the list do
not have to be clicked on as often in order to have a chance
of moving up the list.
For example, if many people click on your Web site and then
quickly hit the back button and select a different listing,
you'll be penalized. Therefore, you can see how my previous
article in this month's issue entitled "How to Create
High Quality Content" will be crucial to enhancing your
rankings on DirectHit, as well as all DirectHit partners such
as MSN. People must like the content they see in order to
stay on your site.
For more detailed information regarding improving your rankings
on DirectHit and DirectHit partner listings like on MSN, see
my article entitled "Scoring
Better on DirectHit".
MSN Featured Sites (reviewed sites)
After any DirectHit matches are displayed, you may see up
to five "Featured Sites." These are sites that the
MSN staff have reviewed and feel are editorially relevant
to that search. You'll mainly see Featured Sites for more
popular searches like cars, travel, mp3, etc.
According to the MSN Program Manager interviewed by Mr. Marckini,
here are some tips for getting your site included in the Featured
Sites listings:
Go through the URL submission process (to Looksmart) correctly.
Be an authority at what you do. When an MSN editor sees great
content at your site, you're more likely to be put at the
top in one of MSN's editorial selected areas.
Use the right keywords that are accurate descriptions of
what your site contains (be honest in your site description
and title).
Differentiate yourself in an area where there's not as much
competition.
Although the contact did not indicate this, you might try
e-mailing MSN, preferably someone in the editorial department
if you can find such a contact. Explain how your site would
be highly relevant to their users for certain searches. You'd
have the best chance of being included in this section if
you first wait until you have a Looksmart listing and you've
done everything you can to improve the quality of your content.
Once you're ready to contact MSN, take advantage of services
like WordTracker to find reasonably popular keywords where
MSN does not currently list four or five featured sites already.
You can then argue that many people are searching on "Keyword
X" but they do not currently have any featured sites
listed there. You could then discuss how your site is a perfect
match for that search. Ideally, you should list some things
that make your site unique and different from your competitors.
Be polite in your e-mail since a demanding attitude in this
situation will definitely get your e-mail deleted.
Mr. Marckini asked the MSN representative whether one had
to pay to be included in the Featured Listings area. The Program
Manager admitted that although some of the very top search
terms have sites that pay fees to be included in that area,
that "Our absolute bar is editorial relevance. Any paid
relationship comes secondary." He went on to say that
there are many listings that their editorial staff found that
they simply feel are editorially relevant and that the company
pays nothing to be listed there.
MSN Web Sites (Looksmart)
After any featured sites are listed, MSN will display results
from the Looksmart directory. These results may match the
rankings on Looksmart, but the MSN representative indicated
they often tweak the ranking algorithm to the formula that
they believe works best.
Looksmart results are displayed on a number of major engines
besides MSN. Therefore, getting a good listing on Looksmart
should become a high priority in your marketing strategy.
Since Looksmart charges a fee to be listed, before submitting
to Looksmart, maximize your chances of obtaining a good listing
by seeing our "Looksmart
Submission Guide"
MSN Web Pages (Inktomi)
For search terms that don't find enough matches in the other
results areas, MSN will pull pages from the Inktomi database.
Inktomi is used on a number of major engines such as HotBot,
Iwon, and others. Does this mean your Inktomi rankings will
be identical on MSN as elsewhere? They are often similar,
but they may differ.
Here's a snippet from Mr. Marckini's interview:
Marckini: "Now do you tweak around the
edges of Inktomi? You know word stemming, automatic pluralization,
stop words, de-emphasizing some words in the query...I don't
know what latitude Inktomi gives you to customize your interface
to them."
MSN: "Yeah, I wouldn't say that our interface
with them is exactly the same as with other partners. We've
worked around what we think is the best for now. And we're
working for our future releases to be even smarter about that.
Can't go into details about that now but that will be something
that will be in our next release."
The MSN Program Manager also indicated that some synonym
matching was employed for the more popular search terms. For
example, he said "synonyms...things like autos or cars
will get you the same list of websites" for searches
on MSN.
So, my advice is to keep an eye on your MSN Inktomi rankings
with WebPosition's Reporter since they may vary from other
Inktomi partners. The WebPosition
Gold Page Critic will give you the latest information
on functional and statistical differences in the various Inktomi
engines in case you need to optimize differently for each
Inktomi engine.
How MSN Deals With Spamdexing
One of the reasons MSN uses multiple data sources, they claim,
is in part an effort to outwit spamdexers.
"There are many clever programmers who get paid a lot
by unscrupulous companies to figure out ways around all of
the rules," our contact pointed out. "A lot of the
same things that legitimate business owners try to do to help
their rankings are exploited by others - especially pornography
people. So we work very closely with Inktomi to get them out.
We have a team here who has become experts in the cold war
of technologies and counter technologies and trying to eliminate
spam."
MSN described this increasingly common annoyance: Some unscrupulous
spammers have begun to search out domain names owned by small
businesses that are about to expire. They'll try to estimate
how much traffic the site attracts, they'll then buy the domain
and then put up a Web page that redirects to their porn site.
Because of search engine crawling frequency, many search engines
will still have the old page title and description in their
index, so you click on what you think may be a site selling
inkwell pens, but instead you get trapped in a porn site's
click captures. "It's absolutely obnoxious," the
MSN contact said.
MSN Warning to Cloakers: MSN claims to ban sites that employ
cloaking technology. To gain the upper hand against companies
that attempt to employ cloaking software to hide their HTML
code, the representative indicated that they share information
about companies they've caught cloaking or spamdexing with
Inktomi and other search engines.
Mr. Marckini then went on to add "If you still think
that the search engines do not care that you're using cloaking
software, think again. Every search engine we interviewed
(and even MSN who most would consider primarily a directory)
went on the record for my new book, Search Engine Positioning,
that they ban companies that use cloaking software."
Obviously many cloaked sites are not banned. Some only target
keywords that are relevant to their site, but the engines
appear to be seeing that the technology undermines their ability
to rank pages based on their own ranking algorithms. Therefore,
based on feedback from people using the technology, it's obvious
that you're not guaranteed to be caught when using cloaking.
However, be aware that according to Mr. Marckini, the engines
appear to be taking a stronger stance against this technique.
What MSN Wishes You'd Understand
Our MSN contact said that he gets frustrated that people often
want traffic that's not appropriate or related to their site,
and it doesn't get them good results. "They tell us their
click-through rates and conversion rates aren't good,"
he said. He gives an advertising example for comparison. His
advertising clients who place ads for very targeted searches
get fantastic results, versus clients who place the same ad
for broad searches. The same principle applies to positioning
your site in a search engine or directory. The more targeted
or narrow your niche (the more specific the keyword phrase
you're targeting), the more likely you'll get the exact traffic
(and results) you want.
"It sounds so logical, but even some of our larger clients
don't understand at first," he indicated. "But people
are finally starting to get it."
MSN: What About Dynamic Pages and Query Strings?
If your Web site contains query strings or dynamically generated
pages that are difficult for search engine spiders to crawl,
stay tuned. MSN hinted that they will be doing a good deal
more linking to pages that are uncrawlable in their "Featured
Sites" section:
"If you look at our featured site section, not only
are they featured because we chose them but you'll also notice
that they're action oriented. We've taken all the best things
we know about exactly what people are looking for in search
results and how they want to get to a site. They're very popular,
and we think it's not only because of placement but because
of how editorially finicky we are, how we word them, and the
quality of how deep we link in the site. We're going to be
deep linking into a number of sites that may or may not be
able to be crawled. It's about getting our users the best
content there is."
The above article, or portions of it, have been reprinted
with
permission from the MarketPosition Newsletter and FirstPlace
Software, Inc. and is copyright 1997-2001. FirstPlace
produces
WebPosition Gold, the award-winning software product to track
and
to improve your search engine rankings. You may download a
FREE
trial copy of WebPosition Gold from: http://www.webposition.com
|
