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MSN SERPs Surprise

by Zeus66
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey all,

Has anyone else experienced this lately... I have a new site (about a month old now) that I built from scratch (new domain name, too). Simple content mini-site (10 pages) built around a fairly tight niche. Threw on some Adsense blocks and one affiliate widget for the odd visitor until I get things cranked up.

I have only had time for minimal promotion, which is why the results have been surprising. I have just 2 articles at EZA and Searchwarp pointing at it; I submitted using Directory Submitter to about 100 directories. That's it. I've been around this block many times and figured the site would be sitting in a dark alley until I got around to really promoting it. Anyway, so I happened to checks the stats last night and it looks like MSN has picked it up and it's all over the first page of results with several variants of the main keyword phrase. The site went from about 10 visits per day to over 200. This is going against nearly 10,000,000 competing pages for that main keyword.

I guess my question is if any others out there have seen this with new sites. I know that Google used to rank a site pretty high initially, then drop it into oblivion (sandbox or whatever) soon after. Can I expect this at MSN? If not, I might flip this puppy since it's already on track to make $100/month at this rate. Not bad for about 5 hours of work.

Thanks,
John
#msn #serps #surprise
  • Profile picture of the author bizideas
    Hey John,
    Did you ever figure out why this was happening?
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    Wow, that goes back to last summer! I don't know why this happens at MSN but I've seen it a few more times since that experience. My conclusion is that they place a lot more value on on-page SEO than Google. Just my opinion, but it could be many other factors I'd have no way of knowing about. All I know is if you're careful and do good keyword research, you can get a high ranking at MSN a lot easier than the other 2 big engines. The traffic is lower, of course, but if you have offers that don't need a lot of conversions to make you some money, it works.

    John
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  • Profile picture of the author simonLC
    A side note, and may not be entirely on point - Though in my experience, in a tight niche, MSN will often rank a site quickly for multiple terms - then within a few short weeks only 1 (possibly 2) of the terms will still show results.

    More to the point, it always seems to be the term that generates more clicks (based on our stats) and is more relevant to the Onpage keyword density.
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  • Profile picture of the author bizideas
    I don't spend too much time on anything outside of Big G. Is it a plausible strategy to focus on MSN and Y! for niches? I mean, we're still talking millions of users.
    I can't imagine the customer profile(s) being all that different.
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    It's niche dependent, bizideas, at least in my experience. If it's a niche about something that appeals on a fun, entertaining, or social level, MSN is pretty good. If it's anything about business, making money, serious stuff, it's not so good. I have a site getting almost nothing but MSN traffic and it does pretty well for a small niche site. But it's targeted to women and it's beauty related. So it falls into that area that MSN traffic is good for. Then I have some other sites that also rank pretty high at MSN and that traffic does squat for me. Those are sites about marketing and related business issues.

    Now, my experience isn't necessarily applicable to yours or anyone else's, of course. Take what you want from it.

    John
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  • Profile picture of the author Odhinn
    I always found that my sites get indexed faster at MSN than Google, and that they show good results faster there too, which is weird because you'd assume that the #1 search engine would find stuff faster, but for me, MSN has always been first. They put a lot of emphasis on building links quickly, in my opinion, and I've always had success with sites that get a blitz of links in a short period of time.
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  • Profile picture of the author Liquidgraph
    I recently got a HUGE SERPs boost on MSN. I guess it just takes Microsoft a good 5 months to notice a site.
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