MSN: Still Too Much Junk in the Trunk - Context is Key!
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I believe MSN could steal a page here out of Google's book and even take it one step further by really pursuing feedback from SEO professionals. I am not saying that MSN should seek advice on specific ways and means of ranking a site, but more of the nuts and bolts of what should be important when trying to determine the value and relevance of a site in regards to a particular search being executed. I have been a party to several highly intelligent conversations in regards to what search engines in general should look at when determining the value and creditability of any given web site.
This seems to be a factor that all search engines could use some improvement on, especially MSN. For instance, take one of our sister web sites, www.devshed.com. The site consists of articles and tutorials for the web development community; thus in its concept, dev is short for developer and the shed represents tools. In other words, it's about developer tools. So obviously we don’t sell sheds, we don’t discuss sheds on any of our sites and it's clear if you spend 10 seconds on Dev Shed that we don’t sell sheds.
But if you type "shed" into either Google OR MSN take a guess where we show? Well not first but pretty darn high up –- and let me tell you, this isn’t a good thing. So if business ever goes south I know I can sell sheds and make a decent living, as we probably get five calls a day from people looking to buy a shed.
Discovering the contextual nature of any web site still seems to be a trick that no search engine has been able to master, and I suspect the first one that does will have a leg up on all of the other search engines. That is most likely an excellent starting point for MSN to attack hard, because making headway in that arena would certainly give it the traction it so desperately needs in order to compete effectively in the search engine field.
One thing that MSN is doing that I like is, at the bottom of each search you run, they ask you for feedback on that particular search. I have no idea if they read that stuff, but I hope they do, because at the end of the day, the search business is about people like you and me, and helping us find what we are looking for. It is not a business that can be run from the confines of a corporate infrastructure; I strongly believe it is critical to get a pulse on the Internet community as well as the SEO community as a whole and to really process the feedback that is received.
Just for kicks I went to MSN and typed in "MSN optimization." A couple of our sites showed up at the top. However a few notches down were sites which had absolutely no content at all related to MSN optimization. Heck, one of the sites that ranked for MSN optimization had a page which said "this category does not yet contain any articles." So what this site did was put up a place holder, which contained the page title and meta data "MSN optimization," but the meat of the page itself basically had an "under construction" notice -- and MSN ranked it fourth! These kinds of searches need to be flagged and dealt with. Until they are, MSN will always be considered a bottom feeder in the search industry.
Next: Where Do We Go From Here? >>
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