What are the important factors to rank well on MSN?

**lkcheng** · 07-20-2006, 03:34 AM

It seem that MSN don't put great weight on backlinks as I saw some websites that rank top 10 on my keywords have less than 100 backlinks. Anyone can give me some ideas and tips to rank well on MSN?

**blake** · 08-04-2006, 12:04 AM

From what I understand MSN values Title, Description, and Display URL and then of course content. Supposedly, shorter specific titles do better.

Basically, if you have been doing your work with Google in mind, you should do well in MSN. MSN doesn't appear to have a "sandbox" penalty like Google.

**vangogh** · 08-04-2006, 01:59 AM

MSN isn't quite as advanced as Google when it comes to links so they still place more weight with on page seo than the other engines. You can probably also get away with more things that won't help in Google like reciprocal links with unrelated sites. However if you place too much emphasis on the techniques that are falling out of favor with the other search engines in time you'll probably see a big drop in MSN as their algorithm gets more sophisticated.

And I don't believe for a second there's a sandbox penalty at Google. Just an effect due to Google using aging criteria in it's algorithm and something that no doubt has been debated here often in other threads.

**etech-martin** · 08-05-2006, 11:37 AM

Using descriptive page titles and page content goes a long way to help you rank well in MSN. Active link building also helps to rank well in MSN.

**lumi** · 08-18-2006, 02:02 AM

backlinks are improtant for all search engines. msn seems to be faster in moving the site afer new backlinks than google. you can see a better position for your keywords if you set some more inbound links from blogs or link directories.

the next is a good optimized page and internal linking. but there is not much different to the optimizing for otehr search engines. like already to read in this thread, if you optimize for google the others are ok as well.

lumi

**garryhudson** · 11-22-2006, 06:51 AM

Hi Guys,

In my opinion i suggest that getting top rank in MSN is easy with doing:-

Directory Submission;
Articles Submission;
Press Release Submission;
Blog Posting and more

Do it and get benefit...

www.adverse-credit-business-loans.co.uk
Garry Hudson

**stOx** · 11-22-2006, 12:37 PM

I aree with van, MSN uses on page factors more than any other engine.
I see them as a kinda "old school" search engine.

Not saying backlinks don't count, but they are less important to MSN than they are to google and yahoo.

**Sir P** · 11-23-2006, 09:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blake

Basically, if you have been doing your work with Google in mind, you should do well in MSN. MSN doesn't appear to have a "sandbox" penalty like Google.

I wish that were the case, my site has over 20,000 indexs in google and over 10,000 in yahoo... in MSN.. 42 ... just dont know what I have missed :/

Only thing I can think that is left is shorter titles. I will work on that

**vangogh** · 11-23-2006, 10:38 AM

Sir P is the site the one in your signature? If it is I'm seeing about 240+ pages indexed by MSN and a lot less by both Google and Yahoo.

**Sir P** · 11-28-2006, 09:24 AM

hi there van ..

no the site I was referring to is www.tab-archive.com

cheers

Sir P

**vangogh** · 11-28-2006, 06:05 PM

I do see what you mean now. I got about 10,000 pages indexed at Google, 5,500 at Yahoo, and only 54 at MSN. I do notice different results for the www and non www versions of the domain though. Set up an .htaccess file to redirect all versions of your domain to one or the other. It's usually standard to send the non www to the www version, but either way is fine.

I only took a quick look, but I'm not seeing any show stoppers in the code. How long has the site been live? If it's a relatively new site it could be that MSN is simply last to the party.

I don't think the length of the page titles would cause the pages to not be indexed. I can see where unique titles might have some kind of effect, but it looks like you generally have unique titles. It could be all the parameters in the URLs. Search engines can read dynamic URLs, but still it's best practice to keep the number of paramters to a minimum and avoid using 'id' in paramter names. It looks like you have URLs with four paramters, one being an id=. That could be the problem with MSN.

**Sir P** · 11-29-2006, 03:32 AM

Hi vangouh.. thanks for the reply ...

The site is about 6 years old haha

The urls are long, I have started to shorten some.. for example:
http://www.tab-archive.com/AFI-guitar-4
replaces:
http://www.tab-archive.com/band.php?...trument=guitar

Thanks for your time and comments.

I will be sure to setup the www redirects though I will do that today
cheers

Sir P!

**vangogh** · 11-30-2006, 02:16 PM

Yeah I had a feeling it wasn't a new site. My guess is the id parameter and maybe the number of parameters in the URLs is what's tripping up MSN.

Let us know how the redirects work. Hopefully they will, but if not you know someone here will try their best to figure it out.

**Sir P** · 12-01-2006, 07:43 AM

Ok thanks again.

Redirect been in place for last couple of days, will monitor that.. cheers for that.

I'm considering lossing the ID but slows the database down as i would need to query database on names instead, and would have to do a lot of cleaning up before hand though. Will certainly have a go though. nothing to lose.

If i got rid of ID, would it benefit the other engines like google too?

Cheers again
Sir P

**Sir P** · 12-01-2006, 07:44 AM

oh additional to that.. is it the fact that the id is called ID or that it has a number in its value? Ifs its the name I can just change it..

Also, I was just told the hypren may be causing problems, I didn't think that really mattered?

Cheers,
P

**vangogh** · 12-01-2006, 01:22 PM

Most search engines will recommend not using ID as a paramter since they don't want to be spidering session IDs. That can create a lot of duplicate content for them.

Based on what you're seeing though it seems like only MSN has a problem with the way you currently have things set up. Keep in mind that any change you make can have both good and bad results so you want to decide how important the MSN traffic is to you.

I would think as long as you redirect things properly all the search engines will be fine with the changes, though it may take a little time for them to sort things out. So you may lose a little at first before getting back to where you are now.

Here's what Google says about dynamic URLs:

Don't use &ID= as a parameter in your URLs.
If you use dynamic pages (for instance, the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not all search engine spiders crawl dynamic and static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

I think they can crawl URLs with those parameters better than they let on, but that's what they officially say.

**appraisal57** · 12-07-2006, 06:57 PM

MSN likes good cleam title and meta descriptions.