Search engine optimisation from Blogstorm

Big MSN Live Search update give me your feedback

by Patrick Altoft on September 27, 2007

Live Search has had the biggest update since 2005 this week and from initial reports it seems to be good for users but bad for webmasters.

Check this result for BlogStorm. Why would a sub page ever be more useful than the homepage for a query like this? Why should some content behind a paywall be ranked about my site? Why do they trust Technorati so much?

Check this as well. Where is the Search Engine Land homepage?

I’m also seeing a lot of sites stop ranking for their own names and title tags, kind of like when Google gives out a penalty.

How has this update affected you? Please post in the comments below.

You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.

Read some similar posts

Published in: Search delicious | digg | reddit | StumbleUpon | Google Bookmarks | Sphinn

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Ross 27/09/2007 at 9:05 am

My sites ‘name’ (Simplehelp) shows up as #1. Using that same MSN search for my name, my Mashable profile shows up first. Which is a bit odd. At least most of the first few results (for my name) are relevant to me, not the guy in the UK that shares my name.

Searching for the phrase that Google ranks my site as having the #1 result for, “flac to mp3″, brings my site up as the 8th result. In the “related searches” box, if you select “convert flac to mp3″ (the first suggestion for related searches) it brings up my post as #1.

At the end of the day, I don’t suspect this will bring me any more than the minimal visits I already get from MSN.

2 naxos 27/09/2007 at 9:21 am

i am ranking in first page for all the keyphrases in my title.So the results i am getting is about the same.

3 JoeTech.com 27/09/2007 at 9:27 am

I’m right on top for “joe tech”, but if I search for “joetech”, I’m behind joetech.cn for some reason.

4 Patrick Altoft 27/09/2007 at 9:46 am

Joe, are you looking at the new results? I see you in fifth.

5 Dave 27/09/2007 at 10:02 am

I have taken a hit in the MSN Live SERPs, not really fussed though the traffic was negligible.

6 Raj 27/09/2007 at 3:00 pm

For the term ‘bloghash’ I still rank#1, but wait! When I search using ‘bloghash.com, I see that there are over 1,700 results but Live displays only 2 per page. Kinda strange to me! Patrick, any insight into this?

7 Rob 18/10/2007 at 2:16 pm

I have a site http://www.directholidaylets.com that has been doing well for lots of keywords across the top 3 search engines.

It was also doing well on msn until they did their update. Now, i dont rank anywhere for any of them anymore, not even for the domain name.

There is also just the homepage that has been indexed.

Very strange and bloody annoying.

I disagree that just a few hits from MSN is not very important. When you have a business EVERY hit is important.

Still doing well in the top 2 thank god.

Rob

Leave a Comment (get an avatar from Gravatar first)

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>