Hello all,

I hate to keep pestering you guys, but I have dropped back to page three in the serp on MSN. It looks as though all ( but one ) of the fan sites have been demoted. Any ideas as to why aniston avenue is on the first page and the rest of us are on page 2 and 3? I'm perplexed...

One funny note ( well I guess you would have had to been there ) this site:

www jenniferaniston com has never actually been a fan site, it is just these people cybersquatting on the domain. In fact it was once listed as an Official site and there has never been an official site.

Their just selling software, always have been. It ranks #4 today, above all of the actual fan sites. Weird. I think it's inbound link illlnes.

Edit:

Oh and one more thing. Does MSN recognize a 301 redirect as meaning "use this instead" m site is listed for the home page as the non-www, which is 301 redirected to the www. I have resubmitted the www, but still the non www is listed.

MSN tends to have a slower update process than the other two. If you made the change recently, give it up to a month and see what happens. They do recognize 301 redirects, though.

Their algo is IMHO much less sophisticated and allows for far more spam than Big G's does, and they've had some issues since migrating to that Live Search (especially spending all that money on the ultra-annoying Ms Dewey rather than...I dunno...relevancy?)

You also might have hit a different datacenter than you usually hit. That's always a possibility.
Data pushing is a possibility.
Algo testing is a possibility.
Old data cache is a possibility.

There's just too much to speculate on that way.

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about it if I were you. MSN is a distant 3rd right now in terms of popularity and usage, and as long as you're found in other sources (other search engines, other sites), not being ranked in one engine isn't important.

The thing that really matters isn't where you rank on a keyword or phrase in one or all of the engines: it's that you're getting quality traffic from as many sources as possible (use your site's stats to figure that out). That way, if one of them goes screwy (e.g. MSN), your other sources will still provide you with traffic and all your eggs aren't in one basket.

Hi Adam,

Thank you. I would agree with you except the drop has been fairly consistent. Page 1 to page 2 to page 3 over the last say month. I dropped to 7th in Google too and I'm starting to worry that I have made some devastating SEO blunder. Given my amateur status at SEO I suspect blunder but I am clueless as to the possible cause. I don’t really spend any time at all with MSN, I have virtually no traffic from them at all and never have, But the consistent drop has me concerned.

As an aside, MSN is not as bad as Ask. It ranks THAT site as #1 or #2.

Bill

Nothing I can see on the surface. The code could be cleaned up, but from what I remember of the site when you asked stuff about it before it's pretty well the same. That's about the only issue I could come up with.

Like I said though, I'd just keep plugging away. Usually drops of that nature mean you're right around the target...you just need to keep doing what you're doing (usual good stuff...adding content, earning the right kinds of links, etc.) and you'll eventually stabilize that whole issue.

The other thing you could do is use your signature to promote your site. E.g. something like [ url=http://www.anistoncenter.com]Jennifer Aniston Center[/url ] (remove the first and last space there). This would provide some anchor text for your link and give SEs a bit better idea of what your site is about (every little bit helps, right?)

If you've posted on other boards (webmaster or otherwise), try the same thing. The worst thing that can happen is nothing.

Hmmm, cleaned up how? I thought it was clean :-)

Ahhh, the simple stuff, forest and trees sorta thing…thanks.

You welcome.

As far as the code goes, at some point what you'll want to do is to try and get rid of all the tables in your layout. Tables are meant for grid data. Divs are meant for layouts.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

You welcome.

As far as the code goes, at some point what you'll want to do is to try and get rid of all the tables in your layout. Tables are meant for grid data. Divs are meant for layouts.

Oh, that, I thought you meant W3C validation ( it does BTW ). I don't want to get into the div vs table thing. I don't think it means a thing to the bots.

It's debatable whether tables or divs mean anything to the bots. I had to fix somebody's broken ASP.NET system that tried to put the viewstate at the bottom of the page instead of the top for SEO reasons. The code didn't work, though, and pages wouldn't work after postbacks. Anyway, some people think the amount of content versus text on a page is important. For me content is always a more important priority, but I've been trying to clean up my code in my between time.

Also, you seem to be going about things the right way. Which means you're probably gaining momentum, but that can go slowly, and it doesn't hurt to give things a helping hand along the way. Like Adam says, ever little bit helps. The forum sig might take a few days or a week, but could make a small difference. If you haven't already, add yourself to some web directories. This won't make a big difference, either, but it's always good to spread your eggs in as many baskets as possible. And the links will float you up a little bit in the search ranking, over time.

If you have the time, write a short article ( with a link or two ) and submit it to sites that aren't as closely related to yours. Then submit it to either article syndication sites, or directly to other web sites that might be interested. Example: most photography sites are fascinated with the idea of celebrity, because, well, people are talking about Danny Glover slugging that reporter. Or Tiger Woods tossing that press photog's camera in the pond. Something about Aniston's relationship to the paparazzi would go over well, and bring traffic from people who want to learn more about a solid example, instead of reading debates about "in theory."

Actually I have been working on converting over to CSS and Divs but it’s not a priority. Just a little at a time. I have an additional problem in that the gal that does the content updates ( 16 lives in Germany ) didn’t know anything about html. I taught her how to do it one Saturday on MN messenger of all things…long Saturday. She is very bright but doesn’t see the point in closing tags among other things. Drives me nuts. In fact I change the dock type from xhtml to html-loose so it would be easer for them. They just can’t get with CSS and don’t see the need…

I already have 9 directory listings and have been posting short comments on blogs; I don’t want to get to carried away with the directories. Google is very fussy about that. I have been considering taking them off the home page though. That’s where they started out and I just left them. In fact the “drop” started about the same time I added these:

http://www.celebhoo.com/

http://www.starbuzz.com

http://www.celebrityspider.com


From here:

http://www.google.com/Top/Society/People/Celebrities/Directories/

All have good PR on the home page; problem with all of them is the page you’re listed on usually has no rank at all. I’m not sure these are even worth having. These are the best I could find too.

And thanks for the photography tip, forest and tree thing again…damn.

And there may well be your deeper problem. Don't focus on PageRank so much...focus on whether or not it's a site that's useful to your end user. By linking to those sites, you'll avoid a lot of the pitfalls associated with a downward spiral.

Besides, external/Toolbar PageRank is only updated every 3-4 months. The internal one (the one that big G uses) is the one they never tell us about.

So, do you think those links are "bad"? Everyone in the fan site community uses them but most don't have them on the home page. I'm thinking they should be moved or possably removed.
Yeah, I know PR is fairly usless, and for people looking for a place to find fan sites thes links are helpful. Question is does, G/Y/M? PR is about the only thing we have to go by.

I have started working on the site title/keywords/ 5 days ago, and I'm a newbie at it. Here is what I get so far:
before doing it, my site is nowhere to be found on msn, google, yahoo for the certain keyword we aim.
after 1 days: #20 on yahoo, #8 on msn, not found within the first 1000 results pages on google
after 3 days: #8 on yahoo, #100 or so on msn, not found within the first 1000 results pages on google
after 5 days: #8 on yahoo, # 1 on MSN, #145 on Google.

So in my case, the results on MSN vary a lot, yahoo tends to be more steady. Google is a bit slow, so I think I've got to give it some more time.
If you have made recent changes, give it some time for the search engines to update.

If it were me personally, I'd follow the fan site logic and move them to a "related/useful info" page Then link to the Aniston page on each of those sites (if applicable). That way, the G/Y/M impact (if any) will be minimal and not worth worrying about, you'll improve your user experience, and you'll clean up your home page.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

If it were me personally, I'd follow the fan site logic and move them to a "related/useful info" page Then link to the Aniston page on each of those sites (if applicable). That way, the G/Y/M impact (if any) will be minimal and not worth worrying about, you'll improve your user experience, and you'll clean up your home page.

Yep, that's what I was thinking too, Thanks Adam.