Obvious Exploitable Flaws in New MSN Beta

[AussieWebmaster]

If as discussions here indicate, MSN rolls the beta version into full access there are a bunch of flaws that many people will take advantage of. We may as well make a list and in that way level the playing field and force MSN to address the issues.

The biggest I see still there at the moment is the wholehearted acceptance of doorway pages. Domains only differing by extension seem to be very popular - and the ones at the top I have seen seem to be just redirects to a single site.

[I, Brian]

Which areas are you looking in? I've not looked too far across the cut-throat markets (excepting certain properties), but so far the mix is interesting.

Relevancy may differ from person to person, but in all honesty, whenever I've used MSN search beta, the results have been fairly good - and useful.

And because the results tend to be fairly different to Google and Yahoo! - at least, where I'm looking - then it adds to a good mix and choice for webmasters - - - which is what search desperately needs.

Is it just certain high profile search terms that are kicking up irrelevant listings for you? Or is it across the board, and I'm simply looking in the wrong places?

[AussieWebmaster]

Do a search for forex and see the results.....

[seobook]

sitewide links are really powerful in MSN search beta

[Dave Hawley]

..and force MSN to address the issues.
Isn't the pupose of the BETA version to get out the bugs and make it better? In others words, I don't believe they will need any forcing.

[AussieWebmaster]

Isn't the pupose of the BETA version to get out the bugs and make it better? In others words, I don't believe they will need any forcing.
I agree that is the usual purpose, but now it is also about advanced publicity.

Plus MS has a history of rolling out products with way to many flaws and running underneath them slowly.

[orion]

Do a search for forex and see the results.....

Indeed, for the query forex trading I got #1 and #2 as follows

"www.forexswingtrader.com"

"forex.forextrading.com"

They redirect to the same page.

Now do the search for just forex, click now the top two results and compare results. Interesting the new landing page.

Orion

[I, Brian]

A client just had me looking at some of the gambling keyphrases in Yahoo! - and all I can say is that doorway pages can be a real problem there.

Question is, are doorway pages really more a problem for MSN than other search engines?

I'm also wondering if Yahoo!'s recent moves on correcting redirect issues, might have inadvertently let the doorway pages come ramming in the index.

[Patrick Berry]

On the keywords that I track I have to say that doorway pages is a greater problem for msn and yahoo than google. Particularly msn.

that said, i have seen a big cleanup of doorway page entries in the beta msn in the last 24 hours.

[AussieWebmaster]

They are everywhere in my niche... top 2 are the same page for 2 different domians for a bunch of my terms and they are not the same company in every case... seems the link spammers and doorway pagers are floating to the top

[sebastian]

not sure of your "niche", but in my "niche" doorway pages are becoming so good, they are almost crossing the line over to good content.

things like RSS feeds, data-driven backends that actually write static html code from the database (as opposed to being data-driven pages) and affliate marketing have given these pages mucho content {lame and repititious as it may be} and awesome rankings. eminds me of rich media banner ads that serve as micro-sites (remember those?)

o no, now people will start calling them "gray doorways" ....egad.

[jackson992]

It so nice to have another search engine. My MSN hits are way up from those of Yahoo and Google.