MSN SEO - Can somebody explain

[memmst]

My site which is about 3 month old, was on the first page of MSN for a month for one keyword. I did not change nothing on a site and the only change that happened was that it went from PR0 to PR 5 on the last google update. 2 days later my site completely dropped form MSN.
Can somebody explain what happened? Thank you, Alex

 

[POLiSH]

Hmmmm....... Can we get the site?

 

[Keyboard Cowboy]

This is typically MSN. There's little you can do other than show stability and keep working your site, getting new related backlinks. It's not uncommon for MSN to boost new sites to the top, only to almost remove them completely again... My advice, optimize for google

 

[memmst]

Thank you guys for your reply. The site is storage.us
I am new to SEO so I just try to do everything possible, from all I read around.
Every advise is greatly appreciated.

 

[webd]

My site which is about 3 month old, was on the first page of MSN for a month for one keyword. I did not change nothing on a site and the only change that happened was that it went from PR0 to PR 5 on the last google update. 2 days later my site completely dropped form MSN.
Can somebody explain what happened?

Your site appears to be down at the moment.

Looked at your cached pages in MSN Search:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site:www.storage.us

It looks like some pages moved? Are there redirects in place? Check with a tool like Live HTTP Headers Firefox Extension.

MSN does not handle redirects well. Long, dynamic URLs with lots of parameters can confuse MSN also.

 

[nikniknik]

Is it true that MSN removes top sites just because they climbed in google results?
Does this mean you cannot dominate both google and MSN on the same KW?

 

[webd]

Google doesn't care if you are ranked in MSN. You can rank in both at the same time.

 

[zangief]

Optimize for google is a good advice , my sites are on top three rankings for every keyword I optimize for and that brings not much traffic yet.
Msn says that they care that the site should not have html etc errors (w3c compliant) , most of my sites are not perfect.
They care about on site optimizations much , domain name like google and keyword rich urls are good.
But again nowadays it is not worth the effort unless you have a site for children or woman (when I told this before people found it offensive , but what I try to say is children and woman are not too conservative about the search engines (at least a part of them) but especially tecnical man cares about them more and they hardly change them.

It took me one year to leave infoseek for google All of my friends were saying hey this is a great search engine , it covers a lot more sites , you can find russian sites with it too , etc.And I did not cared.

 

[dcristo]

There was a big algo update on MSN Live early October.

 

[RustyK]

If you want to keep your sites up and ranked high them you need to learn theme density. SEO is only working with keywords whereas Theme Density works with the structure of your website and its content.

Its the same scenario as if you wanted to build a house. You may have nice location and great neighborhood, but what about the foundation and structure of your house will it last a long time. Is it structured to withstand major weather problems or terminite infestation (Googles slap)?. What about the furnitures and appliances (the content), are they suitable to live in with?.

I can tell you 99% of webmasters today don't know what a few of us know. I'm not trying to be arrogant or anything. It's the fact and the fact is in Theme Density is Master.

 

[whitebark]

BuyAuthority makes some good points.

I've always found MSN to be finicky and odd. You do everything right and they usually reward you - but not always. Sometimes you put up a lousy one page .info site and they seem to love it - and keep it on the first page.

Anyways, MSN has started their own webmaster tools ala google.
http://webmaster.live.com/

 

[dcristo]

MSN used to be like Google in the early days, but now there all over the place.

 

[simon johnson]

It's actually not that hard to rank on MSN. However their algorithm is "scattered" to say the least. If you are starting to rank with Google, then leave it. You will probably find that MSN will catch up in time.

 

[webd]

It's not a bad idea to fix your site so that MSN can crawl it, but I wouldn't pay too much attention to them. MSN/Live is just a flyspeck in the search engine world and they don't send much traffic.

 

[elitedomains]

It's not uncommon for MSN to boost new sites to the top, only to almost remove them completely again... My advice, optimize for google

I was going to say exactly the same thing. Very typical of MSN. I had a site that was #1 there for a competitive keyword and when Google updated, the PR jumped and now it is nowhere to be seen on MSN.

MSN tends to rank newer sites more quickly than Google but is all over the place with thier results in the long term.

Focus on Google.

 

[lordbyroniv]

Can you explain theme density to me?

 

[savegas]

I made big bucks (3600) last month when my affilate link some how got to be #1 for several keywords on MSN LOL now its 51 trying to get #1 again I did not change anything affilate company may have change page

You can make money on MSN but you need to be #1 to do it LOL With Google top 5 is good
If It was #1 on google for a month I would have made 30K plus

 

[bdmunee]

Don't worry about optimizing your site for MSN as the amount of traffic gained from top positions seem to (most times) be just a fraction of what G sends for that same keyword/phrase.

For some reason, MSN's algo will many times rank a new domain high in the serps for a short period and then drop them way down suddenly for no apparent (to us) reason. This has happened many times to me as well. Sometimes they come back up and sometimes they don't - MSN is quirky like that. Keep your keyword density up along with meta tags, H1 and your basic on-page SEO and you should be fine.

 

[grace5]

MSN ranking ...Depends on what your site is about to Rank in msn:

backlinks using good keyword tags/link title

MSN doesn't product alot of traffic,but those that come are in the buying mood and usually do buy.