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Gauging Reactions To MSN Search
Last Thursday, MSN announced the official beta launch of their search
engine. Although a preview had been available on their sandbox site, the launch
marked the official unveiling of the company's proprietary search technology to
the general public. Reaction to what many view as Microsoft's challenge to Google's
throne was swift.
What are your feelings about MSN's new search engine? Are you impressed, or
are you disappointed? Discuss at WebProWorld.
From major publications like The New York Times, NPR,
and thousands of blogs, it seemed everyone had a comment concerning MSN Search's
launch. As with most releases of this size and coverage, responses varied. However,
a quick browse of some of the SEO forums finds the opinion on MSN Search generally
positive.
 The
search engine audience's response to MSN Search was also quick. On WebProWorld,
a thread discussing the
launch was filled with positives. Longtime poster Greeneagle said, "I am impressed!
- They seem to have worked out some serious bugs (referring to the sandbox version)!";
while BStone shared this experience, "They are very responsive to feedback. I
sent feedback about my site not being listed and a few hours later the bot deep
scanned my site and it was listed the next day. Very impressive."
On the WebmasterWorld
forum, their MSN Search thread was spilt in two with 29 pages of responses.
These reactions slid up and down the barometer with comments like "MSN's results
are junk" to others defending the relevancy of MSN Search's results. One such
defense came
from a poster name Dvduval, who said, "I am very pleased with the results on the
new search engine. One nice thing I have observed is there is a good assortment
of both newer sites and older sites in the SERPS, while Google seems to be too
weighted toward older sites."
However, as observed by Ownerrim there may be a potential issue with some aspects
of MSN: "The Microsoft SE is not particularly adept at excluding link schemes.
In one niche area, I saw one fellow's sites, on the same subject matter; appear
on the first four pages of the SERPs. And the content on nearly every one of these
sites is nearly identical. If this is the best that MS can do, Google doesn't
have to worry. MS can run as many butterfly commercials as they want--hype doesn't
replace results."
Owner's comment about the repetitive site's content may have been explained by
Nacho Hernandez on the SearchEngineWatch
forum's thread concerning MSN's launch. In responding to a post made about
content being king in MSN's eyes, Nacho said, "Words of wisdom. It seems that
MSN Search (beta) is exactly what it loves the most, because the pages you pointed
out (along with other examples I have tested) demonstrate that." (That would also
explain why this writer made MSN
Search's first page, something not true with Google.)
One of the more humorous "reactions" actually came from chief MSN competitor Google.
On the day of MSN Search's launch, Google announced the newly increased size of
their search
index. Google's boast of over 8 billion pages eclipsed MSN's expected 5 billion
strong index (which would've beaten Google's previous 4 billion plus).
 One
area of concern among some users was the appearance of MSN's search results page.
To some, the ads were a bit distracting. This was noticeable in Pleeker's post
at WMW, who commented on differentiating between results and ads, "Note to MSN
Search Team: those are not "web results," and they're not the first listings your
algorithm found in the index. Those are paid ads. The opaque "SPONSORED SITES"
off to the far right isn't noticeable enough, and it's disingenuous to list those
under the "Web Results" heading." While poster Skipfactor is a little more direct;
"...ditch the Yahoo ad scheme of ads nauseum: top, right, and bottom is just too
cluttered. Do what the leader does when you're behind in the race." This is referring
to the method in which Google displays their ads.
A great deal of reaction in all forums had to do with where a person was ranked
compared to their ranking on another search engines; those that had high rankings
generally like MSN's results, while those that did not rank well didn't seem too
impressed. However, most seem to welcome another, highly visible, search engine,
if only because it will increase competition. This feeling is echoed
by WMW poster PhraSEOlogy, who says, "I just think that we are at an exciting
point in search engine history; MSN making inroads and Google being the dominant
force (at present)… It will be interesting to see how things pan out in the long
run. I for one, think that this is a great time for SEO's to explore and experiment."
Comment on this article
in WebProWorld.
Chris Richardson
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Keyword
Repetition For Search Engine Optimization
 By
Shari
Thurow
 Reader
Question: I remember reading in other articles about keyword usage rules that
a particular keyword (in this case "asthma") should not be used more than three
times on one page. I read it a year or two ago, so I don't remember the source.
Is this restriction no longer valid? Can you repeat "asthma" in many phrases,
as long as the phrases are different?
Answer: Search engine myths die hard, and this one is certainly an old one. This
myth is based on the meta-description tag. Many search engine marketers discovered
that if they repeated a keyword phrase more than three times in the meta-description
tag, then the search engines would penalize a page for keyword stuffing. At least
that is the origin of the myth as I know it. (Remember Infoseek, anyone?)
There is no hard and fast rule which states that keywords should not be repeated
more than three times on a page. In fact, I tend to think the exact opposite:
important keywords or keyword phrases should appear at least three times on a
page.
 Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
Shari Thurow is Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc., a full-service
search engine marketing, web and graphic design firm. This article is excerpted
from her book, Search Engine Visibility (http://www.searchenginesbook.com)
published in January 2003 by New Riders Publishing Co. Shari can be reached at
shari@grantasticdesigns.com.
Shari
Thurow Answers SEO Questions |
Spiders and Catalogs...
Today's post comes from supremeanime.
They want to know why their W3C validated html catalog isn't
being indexed in Google. Their php pages for the shopping cart and search
functions are showing up but not
the html. From what I understand Google's
spider indexes html pages better than dynamic ones such as a shopping cart.
I could be wrong about that, but that's just my understanding of the situation.
As always I have no answers for supremeanime only more questions, but maybe you
can answer them.
Think you can help supremeanime out? Tell us your
thoughts at WebProWorld.
|| Rafael||
Google
not spidering HTML catalog
By supremeanime
 My
site is in PHP but we have a html catalog. It seems that Google only caches the
php pages rather than going through the catalog.
I have spent a lot of time validating the HTML and feel that we are solid there.
When visitors first hit my site they are in the HTML catalog until they hit "cart"
or "search" which switches them to php pages.
Any feedback or advice why Google avoids my HTML catalog?
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User: Rippoffski
Rating: WebPro Poster
Joined: 06.25.04
Location: Durham, UK
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