MSN appears to have made a bold move and removed the ability to view more than one page of search results for high value keywords. They are clearly confident that a searcher will either find the right result on page one, click on a sponsored link or revise their search.
This is actually a very clever move by MSN – sponsored links on page one are far more lucrative than sponsored links on page two. My guess is that this adds up to more ad clicks and higher CPC’s.
When you search for less lucrative keywords the pagination appears as normal. The screenshots below were taken from searches for “loans” and “blogstorm“. See how the pagination disappears?
Thanks David!
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.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.
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Bold move maybe, but when a site starts placing a higher priority on monetisation over users and usability then maybe it’s a sign of them giving up trying to compete with the bigger boys.
Maybe that or misplaced arrogance over the quality of their search results.
Tried your links and both sets of results have the standard pagination links at the bottom
Hi Patrick
I didn’t get this result when I did the search. I’m in Canada but I can’t think that would make any difference.
same here, just getting the standard results with links at the bottom…
I’m getting the standard SERPS for loans…
Hi Patrick,
Tried the same here (Brighton,UK) and seems to be working fine – http://i38.tinypic.com/2zji3ut.png !! May be you had some bug or MSN’s…? I doubt MSN would ever do such thing…!
Cheers!
No Change for me ?!
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Perhaps a bug rather than a feature? I saw it for about an hour. DavidTutin saw it too:
More comments from Patrick Altofthttp://twitter.com/DavidTutin/statuses/943229831
Should have been a bug…def.!
maybe this post is just “link bait”…would be BOLD to post something like this if it infact is not even true. Wouldnt take much to have checked it out a bit better before going world-wide and make such a claim.
works fine here too!
LOL
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Jason I took a screenshot, what more proof do you need?
More comments from Patrick AltoftI was seeing the same for both that and other queries. As Patrick said, it was also confirmed by others.
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