MSN Search Preview 2 Up

[Phoenix]

Appears MSN is picking up content quite fast. A post I made on seroundtable friday about Mike Grehans article is already in a search I did for the site and title. Pretty good thing to see.

[Nacho]

thanks for the heads up!

I did not have enough time to do heavy testing, so this is just speculating, but here goes:

1) Index continues to be fresh. Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites, but thats a mighty efficient bot!

2) Limit search query to 15 words, not bad.

3) Combinations of "site:www.domain1.com link:http://www.domain2.com" work well.

4) Both "allinurl" and "allinanchor" does not work.

5) IMO, and not enough testing, but I think the algorithm is too simple with a main focus on on-page elements first, off-page second. Here are on-page highlights in order of importance:

• title
• keyword prominence
• KW in URL
• <h1>
• <h2> - One or the other, no need to have both h1 and h2
• bold once
• alt - helps but not a sure factor

6) Limiting slurp to 2 billion based on these test queries:

• 2,000,000,000 containing the
• 2,000,000,000 containing .com
• 2,000,000,000 containing www

7) Backlink check works, but seems low compared to Yahoo! and high to Google:

• MSN -> 831 containing link:http://www.domain.com
• Google -> 358 linking to link:http://www.domain.com
• Yahoo! -> 7,370 for link:http://www.domain.com

8) Sample index size for documents with "blue house" in quotes is competitive:

• MSN -> 230,282 containing "blue house"
• Yahoo! -> 268,000 for "blue house"
• Google -> 304,000 for "blue house"

9) Search results are faster, but I don't have a comparison speed test to prove any actial numbers.

That's it for me to report for this 3rd round of testing. You can go ahead and do your own conclusions, I can not give any recommendations at this time, sorry, except for . . . MSN is looking sharp and I can't wait for launching day.

[Phoenix]

Nice analysis Nacho!

Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites

I agree, but on two sites I checked that have dates published on the site, it was longer than 5-7 days from last week.

[I, Brian]

A cursory look at the results of a few personal searches, suggests to myself that the MSN engine pays particular attention to exact anchor text, without fiddling about with the weighting so much as Google. It's showing superb results for a couple of non-commercial reference sites I admin.

[Buddha]

Overall, the results are pretty good. I would consider them a serious threat (or opportunity)

A couple of things I noticed.
- Seems relatively easy to SEO
- Authorities do not dominate top rankings for a wide range of keywords as they do in G. Authorities are pushed down a bit and niche sites seem to rank tops for their target keywords. (ie. keyword-keyword2.com sites)
- Does not seem to catch near duplicate sites
- An authoratative hub that I watch in G is penalized or banned. It doesn't rank at all.
- Number of in-bound links does not seem as important as anchor text/internal text.

[Nacho]

Originally Posted by Buddha

Authorities do not dominate top rankings for a wide range of keywords as they do in G. Authorities are pushed down a bit and niche sites seem to rank tops for their target keywords.

I agree with this observation, because from the little testing I was able to do, on-page factors weigh more than their link popularity algorithm, which is contrary to Google's overall algorithm. However, with their testing for new link algorithms seen out in the open and who knows what's in closed doors, I strongly believe that MSN's algo today will not be the same for full launch. I wish optimizing for MSN will be a little more challanging and make it more fun

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by Nacho

Index continues to be fresh. Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites, but thats a mighty efficient bot!

Going into great depth and quite often. In logs on two different sites, MSN suddenly has more than twice the bandwidth usage of all the other bots combined.

Slurp on the other hand basically comes in and sniffs a few pages and goes away... kind of like an old arthritic hound dog that just can't get the energy up for a good hunt.

[I, Brian]

Looks like there's been a big change in the algorithm since I last posted on results - link pop seems more processed than before.

[Dodger]

More processed? As in more links are showing up? That might be. I did just a couple of precursory checks and the "total results" figures are quite large, larger than Yahoo would be.

I am still not trusting those figures though. After you move ahead a few pages, the total changes to something else.

[callback]

To me, MSN new search engine is yesterday's Google. My lost high rankings in GG before now have come back to MSN. So, I must love it and wish it goes alive the sooner the better.