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View Full Version : MSN fighting bad seo?


xan
02-17-2005, 09:46 AM
I thougth you guys would be interested in this article I came accross:

CRM news (http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/Gunning-for-Google-40318.html)

Summary by "the target":

* One specific optimization tactic that works well on MSN Search is known as Google bombing.

* With this tactic, if you can get sites that are considered important to link to a particular page with specific link text, that page can do well in MSN Search even if the words used in the link text don't appear anywhere on the page itself.

* Unhappy that its MSN Search is only the third most popular search engine, Microsoft has feverishly been working on its own search technology to replace Yahoo's Inktomi (Nasdaq: INKT) engine, which had been powering MSN Search.

* MSN Search currently has a 15 percent share of the search engine market, which will probably grow over time as Microsoft leverages its installed base of Windows users, embedding MSN Search into users' desktop in a new edition of Windows codenamed Longhorn.

* What's more, MSN Search is already in beta for integration into MSN Messenger, its instant messaging application.

* The tried-and-true optimization tactics appear to work quite well.

* The text within your page title is given more weight by the search engines than any other text on the page; keywords at the beginning of the title tag are given the most weight.

* "Link popularity" -- the number of links that point to your site -- is a key criterion that search engines use for ranking pages, but with an important twist: There's a weighting factor placed on each link to take into account the importance of the page linking to you.

* From a search user's perspective, the query syntax and advanced search operators of MSN Search work as one would expect.

* For instance, you wrap an exact phrase within quotes, just as you would on Google or Yahoo.

It fits with what myself and others were saying: keep it clean!

(There's a weighting factor placed on each link to take into account the importance of the page linking to you. - - Woohoo, how revolutionary.)

seomike
02-17-2005, 06:56 PM
MSN had their chance for a big entrance. IMO they screwed the pooch.

I mean come on, do you honestly think we'll take them seriously when they say in their policy, "Don't stuff keywords in alt tags we don't like that".

<technique>
<spam>
Not only that but you can make doorway pages galore using their own results by just adding a &format=rss to any query. Just plop an html parser on a site and have the result feed come back for the term site:www.yoursite.com and now ladies and gentlemen we have an instant dedicated 3rd party site map...I mean doorway :D sending all sorts of keyword rich links to your site. ha!
</spam>
</technique>

They're just a rehash of a wannabe pagerank engine, with a 24 hour refresh for an all spammer party! Way to go....Yawn..

Michael Martinez
02-20-2005, 08:13 PM
Not only that but you can make doorway pages galore using their own results by just adding a &format=rss to any query. Just plop an html parser on a site and have the result feed come back for the term site:www.yoursite.com and now ladies and gentlemen we have an instant dedicated 3rd party site map...I mean doorway :D sending all sorts of keyword rich links to your site. ha!


They appear to have removed the line breaks from the RSS output. A standard parser won't be able to convert the content. I tested this by trying to add such a feed to an MSN page, and MSN choked on it.

So, they seem to be on to that trick.