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Written by Nancy Schettler January 19, 2006
We've had some interesting posts lately regarding Google listings (thanks, fellow subscribers)... but I have a question about MSN. Though most of my traffic (and sales) come from Google (or Yahoo), I certainly do better when my two sister sites (awelldressedkitchen.com and favoritefabrics.com) can be found in MSN.
Apparently they are in MSN's database (somewhere), but when I search for the name of my site ("A Well Dressed Kitchen"), what appears in the search results is lots of links TO the site - hardly any of which I solicited! - but I went through the first 10 pages of results, and still could not find any results from my own site. ?? Really, truly, I used to be findable! I don't have time to check rankings very often... it's when things get slow that I start to look for the reason why... and it seems that it was around December 26th or 27th that I stopped getting any significant visitors from MSN.
The timing was the same for my second site, "Favorite Fabrics"... again, MSN traffic dwindled to nothing after 12/26. I suppose I should just give thanks that at least the traffic lasted through the holiday shopping season.
Has anybody else noticed this? Anyone out there have any ideas what is going on, or what to do?
Nancy Schettler
A Well Dressed Kitchen
Written by Don Baker
January 20, 2006 > ... it's when things get slow that I start to look
> for the reason why... and it seems that it was
> around December 26th or 27th that I stopped
> getting any significant visitors from MSN.
When I read your post, Nancy, my first question was whether you'd been getting MSN-referred visitors via the Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly Overture) pay-per-click network. MSN Search has been slowly replacing YSM PPC results with those from its new adCenter PPC system.
If you're running YSM ads, it's possible your ads have stopped showing on MSN within the past month. As studies have shown that MSN searchers click on PPC ads more than Yahoo or Google users, you could've been getting many MSN-referred visitors from PPC, but MSN replaced your YSM ads with its own customers', just after Christmas. I don't know.
It's also strange that your MSN visitors should drop off immediately after Christmas, as our clients' retail-oriented sites show continued gift-related sales well into January, before a drop-off in February. Maybe MSN did an index shuffle that knocked you out of the top rankings -- I ran a quick search on "table runners" and didn't see awelldressedkitchen.com in the top three pages. (As there's no MSN "religion" (yet?), to my knowledge there's no one obsessively following MSN datacenter updates and announcing index updates in real time.)
This is all off the top of my head, obviously. I still don't trust the MSN organic-search results, BTW -- they've gotten more relevant in recent months, but I'm not convinced their algorithm is totally out of beta -- which, of course, makes adCenter PPC more relevant.
Best wishes,
Don Baker
NSI Partners
Written by Claudiu Spulber January 23, 2006 > ... it's when things get slow that I start to look
> for the reason why... and it seems that it was
> around December 26th or 27th that I stopped
> getting any significant visitors from MSN.
Nancy, I must say that "I feel your pain". I wrote a while ago that our website, novapdf.com was in the Google sandbox (barely any visitors) but on the MSN we were on the first position for our major keywords.
Now things changed since we are out of the sandbox but been kicked off the MSN listings and I don't have any clue why. After the 20th of December (I looked in the logs) we didn't receive any visitor from MSN, when before that date we had at least 20 per day. So definitely they changed something around that date, since our cases are very similar.
For instance, if you do a search on MSN for links spidered by the robot, http://snipurl.com/lu8n [search.msn.com], you'll see that you only have your home page listed, when normally there should be more (all the pages from your website that were indexed). The same thing for our website, if I do a search for site: http://www.novapdf.com our main page is not even displayed, instead 3 PDF files from our site.
What I did is that I contacted them and all I got in return was standard "how to submit" emails or suggestions to get a SEO company. I'm sure that they've changed something in their system and it seems that we were seriously affected by this. Also, for our other website, I seem to have the impression that the MSN bot is less active as it used to be.
So, I get the impression that all we can do is wait until the next update.
Regards,
Claudiu Spulber
backup4all.com
Written by Nancy Schettler January 23, 2006 > ... my first question was whether you'd been getting
> MSN-referred visitors via the Yahoo Search Marketing
> (YSM, formerly Overture) pay-per-click network.
Don,
Thank you for your post!
I haven't done any paid advertising at all for either of my sites... so it can't be any PPC or ad issues that are responsible. It is curious that it happened right after Christmas, and our hits from Google and Yahoo have continued pretty much unchanged. So I'm still totally in the dark!
It would seem that only the home (index) pages are in MSN. I do have sitemaps, most of the interior pages (the ones which generate sales) are only two links away from the index page, via the sitemap.
Nancy Schettler
Written by Reg Charie January 24, 2006 > Now things changed since we are out
> of the sandbox but been kicked of the
> MSN listings and I don't have any clue why.
- Claudiu Spulber
Claudiu,
I do not profess to be an expert in SEO but it seems to me that you are over-using "PDF" both in your meta tags and on your site. Your keyword meta tag contains some 18 repetitions of PDF and your main page 30+. Perhaps the search engines are considering this as "spam."
Thank You,
Reg Charie
dotcom-productions.com
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