SEO for MSN

[AussieWebmaster]

Now that the new MSN seems to be stretching out everywhere... it is time to start making some notes on optimization... what seems toi be working etc.

I see that Domain names are big, though Titles not as much, even url names can help...

[iamrussell]

I think titles are very important. I added a couple words to my title and it totally nocked me off the first ten pages. I took the extra words off and I went back to #1. It seems that the shorter the title, the better. And I've certainly seen that backlinks can get a page to the top with out anything on-page that relates to the keyword.

I think MSN gives equal weight to on- and off-page SEO.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by iamrussell

I think titles are very important. I added a couple words to my title and it totally nocked me off the first ten pages. I took the extra words off and I went back to #1. It seems that the shorter the title, the better. And I've certainly seen that backlinks can get a page to the top with out anything on-page that relates to the keyword.

I think MSN gives equal weight to on- and off-page SEO.

I am going to be doing some thorough testing of MSN in the coming weeks to see what elements have the greater impact.

[seobook]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

I am going to be doing some thorough testing of MSN in the coming weeks to see what elements have the greater impact.

please do share some of the results

[KeywordMonkey]

I'll second that...

[AussieWebmaster]

Nice move Aaron now I have to do some serious work... one thing to do it for me... another to publish what all will attack...lol

[Nacho]

Make sure you have your 301's very well in place, because MSN Search continues to have URLs, which who knows where they picked them up but are still ranking high even though they no longer exist in most servers. Check all your keywords very carefully, because as volume continue to increase you still have time to make changes that will reflect in better conversions and ROI.

[littleman]

Early crack at it from observing my own sites...
I think inbound link text is big in the new msn. KWs in outbound links count as on page content. In one case I see a page that ranks for a term which only appears once on the page and is not in the title and metas, but that page has "authoritative" links pointing to it.

Also, looks like third level domains inherit some 'authority' from their parent domain even if the link pop for the third level itself is poor?

[Carlos Chacón]

I have notice that my website is ranking pretty much similar as in Yahoo! ....searching the same keywords.

The HUGE difference is that they are not Sponsors Results section in this new msn beta search.
In my personal opinion that is a great opportunity to show te SEO quality knowledge of all of those who says that they are SEO guys.

Good Luck!

[strategicrankings]

IMHO internal links and on page content has higher importance than off page factors such as inbound links.

[creativecraig]

I would say inbound links with good anchor text is huge for the new MSN. I am ranking on competitive terms with hardly any content but with good links pointing to them!

[AussieWebmaster]

So far domain name seems to have a bigger influence that at Google. Linking from similiar C class domains are not down played as much as by Google... will keep you posted... will test impact of Title tags later this week.

[seomike]

I've noticed that MSN is counting IMAGE links in their backlinks. Might want to test the limits on that.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by seomike

I've noticed that MSN is counting IMAGE links in their backlinks. Might want to test the limits on that.

Are you talking about links from banners etc. or the actual link to an image inside the src code.

[seobook]

related to this thread...

NickW recently posted that MSN does not much discriminate between link types well
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1297

[yellowwing]

Think they have rolled out too quickly. And will be adjusting algorithms as time goes on.

I did a search for "Mississippi Real Estate" and the number 5 result was:

Las Vegas real estate - Nevada homes and condos
Las Vegas real estate - New Homes, Resale Homes, Condos, Rentals, and Apartments from the top Nevada realtor Home Finder Search New Homes Search All Homes Pre-Qualify Now Las Vegas Info Community Info ...
www.realestate-vegas.com

This page and it's encoding has zero mention of the word "Mississippi". In my opinion, it would be wise to keep watching but not to radically change our own pages.

Chasing MSN rankings now will be chasing smoke for awhile longer.

[hiero]

I've noticed that paying attention to on and off page keyphrase redundancy as it applies to SEO places you well in MSN's index.


Also it looks like MSN's index still has a lot to spider when you compare like results to Google's index. The index keyphrase searched for counts that Google returns are considerably higher than MSN's.

The good news is now that we have 3 major search engine companies showing 3 different sets of results one should be able to gain top results in at least one search engine!

[AussieWebmaster]

I will have a more thorough list of tested ones by this time next week.

[seomike]

Are you talking about links from banners etc. or the actual link to an image inside the src code.

<a href="http://www.somesite.com/"><img src="..." width="" height=""></a>

This is showing up as a backlink in MSN.

I have a portfolio page on our site and a brand new client we have is showing the portfolio page as a backlink. It's just an image.

Don't know if it has weight. maybe I should test it by dropping some an alt tag with some keywords in the img tag

[I, Brian]

MSN likes links in number. Is that really a bad thing, though?