MSN Indexing Vs Google/Yahoo/Ask indexing

pbarry

When searching on Google / Yahoo / Ask using my major keywords, I get pretty much the same low ranking......

However when I search on MSN using the same keywords, I'm ranked no. 1 & 2, and also my other related sites are all featured in the 1st page!!

That would be great if everybody used MSN but unfortunately thats not the case.

What are the major differences in how the above SE's index? Surely they can't have too many?

-pb

TheMoralist

Havn't a clue, but www.sitepoint.com is good for that kind of information.

Bananna man

Very big subject but have a look at this for getting a better listing in Google.

fizzy

if only we knew pb! while search engines can publish some very general guidelines on how to rank well, nobody really has a clue what they are at for sure.

msn tend to reflect new sites and changes more quickly in their index, so have you made any seo changes recently?

also, when you search at msn with an irish ip, the results you get are automatically from search.msn.ie (even if you searched at msn.com), so check that it is not just your msn.ie search rankings that are much higher. unlike google, when you do a worldwide search at msn ireland, you can get quite different results than doing a msn.com search.

i have noticed myself that my msn rankings can be much more favourable than google and yahoo (which are broadly similar i find). i have even achieved good rankings for very generic terms in msn.

but to be honest, i have noticed that msn generally gives quite different results to google and yahoo though. in my own searching, i tend to go to msn if i have not found anything great in the other 2, because it can tend to rank sites highly that were nowhere to be seen in the other 2 but are quite relevant. but overall, it's very hit and miss. google and yahoo generally offer much more relevant results, so if your rankings are only good in msn, i'd say it 's the site that's out of line not the search engines!

i just had a look at allhonours.ie which i presume is one of the sites you are concerned about? first off, you need to get some keyword rich text content on the home page. at the moment, it's mainly text links. text links are great for search engines and it's good to have lots of them, but you need content to. if you think about it, most home pages that just have links everywhere are spam sites / domain landing pages, so search engine algorithms probably think along the same lines!

it's good that you have a descriptive title tag, as this is half the work! but vary these tags on certain pages and target specific phrases in the text and titles on those pages for a better result.

finally, there are pages on your site e.g. about us which hardly link to any other pages on your site. it would be better if these pages included links back to the main sections of your site, even from a usability point of view and overall site consistency. when i clicked through to the about page from a search engine, i got the feeling i was missing some of the page - i figured i was only seeing one frame worth of content or something and frames are a disaster with search engines.

but overall, get some text in there, tweak your titles and you should see results, but be patient!

good luck

mneylon

If your site is search engine friendly and has quality links inbound it should get good results on all of the search engines. However the result placement will vary considerably

I would recommend that you track your traffic carefully and see how people are arriving on the site(s) ie. which keywords / phrases and which search engine / site is driving them to it.