Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for MSN’s RankNet Technology - Crawling Behaviors and Optimization Techniques
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What we have seen as important to the way MSN ranks a website can be listed into a few basic concepts. MSN relies heavily upon anchor text in links and content is still King. Because of this, the MSN algorithm relies upon high keyword density as well, even more so than Yahoo. The presence of a robots.txt file lately has been seen to be highly important to the MSN robot’s crawls, and MSN has been known to completely disregard sites that don’t incorporate the robots.txt. Whether this is part of the new neural net or simply a filter, we can’t be certain.
Keyword meta tags no longer hold any importance, and MSN does not index data from the meta keywords tag because they are not visible to the user in a standard browser, as well as having a long history of being spammed. You should always include a title and description meta tag, however.
Keywords in the URL are extremely important, coming in at a full 85% of the top ten sites ranked. Other tags that MSNBot looks at are header tags, alt tags in images, or the title attribute in links. MSN does not differentiate between the <b> or <strong> tags. Either one is fine.
MSN receives about 15% of all of the search engine queries on the internet. They currently do not index flash, but it is on their TO-DO list based on customer feedback. MSN also doesn’t have any issues with 302 temporary redirects. When a page is redirected, MSN indexes the page the visitor will end up on, however, and not the temporary page.
MSN regards static pages more important than dynamic pages, even though they do rank dynamic pages. It also is difficult to sabotage a website in MSN through such techniques as washes (attempting to turn a duplicate content penalty against a site by flooding the SERPs with similar content), or linking to a site from spam pages.
It’s not clear as to whether or not age of a website factors into a MSN’s RankNet algorithm
Filters
Many people would like to have you believe that MSN doesn’t have a duplicate content filter, or penalize sites with duplicate penalties. This isn’t true. In fact, it is MSN’s duplicate content filter that got my number one vote after performing an experiment not long ago with an article I wrote that was my original content. Yahoo did fairly well over a few weeks weeding out duplicate content, and settling on my original content as the Real McCoy, and Google failed miserably. It was MSN that not only filtered out the duplicates, but gave me “bonus points” for having the original. This tells me that not only does MSN employ a filter, but it also has the technological ability to determine content origin and source.
There is a rumor that has yet to be substantiated, that MSN search gives a slight advantage to sites running on Microsoft Servers with IIS.
Another possible problem with MSN search results is possible manipulation via blog comments and forum posts, but MSN says they are aware of the problem, and it is on the TO-DO list as well.
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