MSN: Still Too Much Junk in the Trunk
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It has been a while since I have taken a long and hard look at MSN. As I have made well known in the past, I still strongly believe that the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community as well as the Internet as a whole would be much better off if there were several accurate search engines as opposed to just one. With that premise in mind I decided to revisit MSN to see if they have made any improvements in the results it returns for various search words. I'll bet you can figure out the answer to that question by simply re-reading the title of this article.
I have been reading a lot of forum threads on this topic and there seems to be a great division among SEO experts. The first belief is that MSN is putting the control into the hands of the webmasters, and that this is a good thing. By making it clearer and easier to understand what the MSN engine will respond to, this actually enhances the users' ability to find what they are looking for, because webmasters will actively modify their sites to go after the keywords they believe are the most appropriate for their site/business.
I belong to the second school of thought – which is that by allowing the results of the MSN engine to be so easily tampered with and optimized for, the engine itself is much more prone to spammy results. If you buy into that thought process, then the next logical assumption is that MSN will never catch Google, will always command a tiny fraction of the Internet's searches, and whatever they do will be deemed irrelevant.
I Kick Butt on MSN!
What I find interesting is that people are still optimizing for MSN; they are actually proud and go so far as to brag when their results show up on page one. Two things come to mind: first, why would you even care, as we all know that MSN’s results are still very inaccurate and their reach is still minute compared to Google? Second, optimizing for MSN is akin to beating up your five year old niece and stealing her candy bar. It's easy to do – the results are instant – and the candy bar tastes good. But after it's all said and done, what do you really have, other than a crying niece and some extra fat around the midriff to show for your efforts?
Optimizing for MSN is very different from optimizing for Google, with both engines looking for vastly different things to determine ranking –- so unless you are running two different versions of your site, optimizing for MSN is pointless. Besides who is using MSN for search anyway?
I can tell you that across the Developer Shed network MSN equates to five percent of our traffic, that’s it. So until Microsoft creates a better mouse trap –- a MUCH better mouse trap -- I do not anticipate that percentage of searches to increase any time in the near future. I suppose if I started to see a dramatic increase in MSN searches, to the point where it equated to 20 percent or more of my overall traffic, I would start looking into finding a happy medium to optimize for both Google and MSN. Until that point, I can't see a good justification for all of that extra labor.
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