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Article - MSNBot - Searching For Ways To Make Redmond Rise
Again By Jim Hedger SEO Manager of StepForth
Search Engine Placement Inc.
What would you do if you were tasked with designing a new
search engine?
You have all the resources the world can offer and the certain
knowledge that your project is so important to your employer
that mountains, molehills, companies, code and really comfy
office chairs will be moved, built or acquired to meet your
needs, no questions asked. Your boss demands a product that
is better than best and, having failed to notice how overwhelmingly
essential search would become back when he came to dominate
everything else, appears ready to back your project with missionary
zeal and Machiavellian maneuvering.
The cold hard truth is, the future of one of the largest
corporations in the world, owned incidentally by the world's
wealthiest man, may well rest on your shoulders. In this scenario,
there are no obstacles, only the challenge of beating Google
at Google's best game. Whoa....
MSN released the beta version of their long awaited proprietary
search engine earlier this quarter. Beta releases are the
software world's version of a dress rehearsal. Mistakes will
happen, even in the best productions, and the beta stage is
the place to field-test a product, finding and fixing inevitable
problems before the real, commercial version of the product
is introduced. MSN(beta) search has seen its share of bumps
over the past few weeks including a short period when it appeared
the search tool had crashed. Regardless of any minor mishaps
in its first weeks, MSN(beta) Search shows very good results
generated from a database of approximately 5 billion spidered
websites it began compiling over a year ago. While MSN(beta)
and the search tool found at MSN.Com are different search
tools delivering very different sets of results, the results
generated by MSN(beta) will eventually replace the Inktomi
based listings shown on MSN.Com. That's when the real fun
will begin. Please note, as other commentators have pointed
out, this is a BETA version and likely to change in coming
weeks before the undisclosed live release date.
When told to build a better mousetrap, MSN engineers set
their goals fairly high and approached the problem from the
most logical point possible. They seem to have looked at the
best ideas everyone else has come up with and tried to incorporate
them into their search tool. The results are better then expected
with highly relevant site listings that have been compared
to earlier versions of Google's index. That makes sense given
that MSNBot the beta-search spider works very much like GoogleBot,
looking for many of the same site elements including incoming
links, contextual relationships between linked documents,
and overall site context. MSNBot also seems to be interested
in keyword-enriched titles and seems especially interested
in anchor text.
MSNBot, like GoogleBot and Slurp finds sites for its index
by following links from one page to another within or between
sites. The majority of sites in MSN(beta)'s index were found
by MSNBot as it followed links from sites it had already visited.
A check of backlinks, or links recognized by MSNBot as being
relevant to a specific site almost always shows much higher
numbers than a similar check on Google or Yahoo leading us
to conclude that, for the time being at least, MSNBot does
not filter links to the same degree as its rivals. In other
words, relevancy does not appear to be as strong a factor
with this version of MSN(beta) than it is with Google, at
first glance anyway. One of the biggest improvements MSN(beta)
brags about is its ability to figure out the context of individual
paragraphs found on a page and apply that context as a "relevancy"
factor against pages that might be linked to from that paragraph.
Subsequent paragraphs on the same page might be about totally
different topics without undermining the contextual relevancy
of the links found in the previous paragraph. Google tends
to compare relevancy on a page to page basis, making it more
difficult to address a wide ranging topic on one page.
As with Google and Yahoo's spiders, MSNBot likes well defined
and functioning link paths within your website. Providing
a clear and well explained path for MSNBot to follow is critical
to good rankings. The easiest way to accomplish this is to
establish a text-based sitemap page appended to your website
and be certain there is a link to that sitemap page on each
of the other pages in your site. For database driven sites,
this can be accomplished by changing the "footer"
attribute on the template that creates the base-pages. There
is an important thing to note here, especially for webmasters
of highly dynamic or commerce driven sites, use static URLs
to link to products in your database and do whatever is necessary
to avoid tracking systems that append unique user IDs to URLs.
This article is not going to provide a lot of details around
these elements as some or even much of what is written is
subject to sudden change (this is a beta version after all),
and the beta version simply hasn't been around long enough
to express reliable ideas in writing yet. Once you have ensured
that MSN(beta)'s spider can travel from one end of your site
to another, and has a way into your site from an outside reference,
take a look at the following elements of your site.
MSNBot seems to really like the techniques used by SEOs at
StepForth. StepForth pays a lot of attention to keyword enrichment
of the basic but critical elements of a site. Assuming navigation
issues have been taken care of, websites that use keyword
phrases in titles, anchor text, and early in the page content
are doing very well in MSN(beta)'s index. We do not know for
sure what MSNBot thinks of meta tags however we recommend
using the basic description and keywords meta tags along with
robot exclude text when necessary. MSNBot, basically likes
clean code with good, common sense SEO. In a previous article,
we republished the guidelines MSN posted to the MSN(beta)
search site.
MSNBot Guidelines, at a glance:
- Incoming links from other websites with keyword-enriched
anchor text used to phrase the links
- Easily read code that has been W3C validated
- As with all search engines, best results are found when
you only address one topic per page
- Keep your page site reasonable, 150kb is the maximum
size recommended in the MSN guidelines
- Apply keyword phrases to well written sentences early
in the code. Don't use techniques such as keyword stuffing
or invisible text.
- Use a sitemap to ensure that every page in your site
is open to MSNBot.
There is a keyword density rule for MSNBot however we do not
think that keyword density is the same for every business
sector. For instance, the optimal keyword density for Maryland
real estate will be different than the optimal keyword density
California real estate, even though sites found under those
keywords will represent the same business sector.
Any common sense rule that applies to SPAM on other search
engines applies at MSN(beta) as well.
The MSN(beta) search engine is slated for full release any
time now but, as with other Microsoft products, that doesn't
necessarily mean we're going to see it anytime soon. The engine
has been very stable over the past two weeks and is providing
very strong and consistent results. Any bugs that remain to
be worked out are well hidden and do not seem to be effecting
the search function in any discernible way. When MSN does
release their search engine as a full-version at MSN.Com,
they will have a good tool that presents a credible alternative
and serious challenge to Google and Yahoo. The long days of
mono-culture search are over.
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