MSN new update

[SkiRE]

Wow...just couldn't pass this thread up

here's what I believe I see...and I might get a bit off topic here...but

I totally agree with ReSale, recip links are definitely a natural occurrence and the best thing that they offer is the ability to get your site indexed and crawled consistently. They are certainly not given "zero" points or credit, as Rolex claims, and they help to establish a theme for your site. Alone they will not bring you fortune. But no success in any form can be obtained by a single dimensional approach. You need to have many factors at work to get good rankings across all the search engines.

As for one way links...yes they are great...but I have a site that was on the first page in msn for my town's name. This site only has one way links. The outgoing links from the site are all paid ads and there are not that many. Some are buried in flash. This site dropped to #30 something in the last MSN update. My thought is that the home page is too over optimized. The keyword density is pretty high in many different areas, img tags, onpage content, internal links....etc.

This same site jumped up 30 spots to #13 in google for the same town name. Traffic to the site has increased 5X since the upward move in google. So am I worried about the 10 people who used to visit from MSN?...no.

The site also dropped in yahoo....traffic still has gone up. Google rules....live it and learn it....it's going to be that way for a long time. They are the "Windows OS" of the web....it's going to take some really ingenious idea to knock them out of this position.

Google specific....there's an aging factor in play here...not sure the exact details but I just took over a site for a wine festival. The domain is 6 years old. The old site was poorly built and had very bad internal navigation. We put our design to it and now rank in the top 5 for plain old "wine festival". That's for the whole planet, 28.5 million SERs. We also rank in the top 10 for every winery name that will be attending. Not to mention the chefs, wine experts and featured artist that will be attending. The old site used to see about 350 visitors a month....we are now over 3000 a month. We did a very small amount of off page optimizing and the site only has a PR of 4...not that, that's any indicator of anything. We do have the benefit of many one way links but most of them are buried way down in deep pages and usually have variables in the url...they also don't use good anchor text in these links.

Sub-domains...get a few...they seem to inherit the popularity of the parent domain and do not get caught up in the new site sandbox or whatever goes on with new sites....whole separate topic there. We have a couple that have attained very high rankings for popular terms with very little effort...compared to that of promoting a new site. Only had success in google with the sub-domains. I'm about to lauch one for San Diego...that should be a real test of the value of these.

MSN specific...for almost a year now msn has been all over the place with it's results in my area(terms I optimize for)...almost to the point of what looks to be the rotating of the first and second pages of serps...back and forth...one week we are #1 next week #13 and so on...still brings in little traffic.

I agree that their algo is very weak when it comes to determining the value of links....anything goes.

Yahoo Specific...I'm reaching on this one...but it could be true...they hate sites with adsense. I was #1 in Yahoo for three years...I added adsense to my site and dropped to #25. It's the only change I made and my competitors aren't doing anything special. My site is 8 years old and brings in 600+ visitors a day...400+ from google alone I also believe that they are devaluing sites that have links off the home page...but that's really just a guess. I have no proof other than I have outgoing links off my home page and yahoo hates me . I also don't have a yahoo directory listing. Good news. None of my customer's site dropped. They dont have adsense or outgoing home page links. I built them all from new domains and applied the same techniques across the board. So all I can do is compare them to each other. We share a lot of link partners and have some one way links. All have dedicated ips. Lots and lots of similarities with the exception of me having adsense and home page links....hard not to make a conclusion this is the issue.

Your link pages:
Make them part of the site...not a dangling link off the home page to appease those people who need to be two clicks away from the front door. Treat that section of your site as you would any other area, think "natural". Add it to your navigation so that it becomes part of the site. This will also make these page more popular and will bring in better link partners....thus giving you better backlinks. Interlink your link pages. I put links to my state link pages on other state's pages that have no links. IE. Iowa link's page connects to the CA link page using the title of the CA links page....bumps the CA page up a bit and provides some content for the Iowa page that has no link partners....it's all under your control.

Here's a great example: "http://www.jimolenbush.com"
Every page footer...including the home page..has links directly to each state's links page...doesn't seem to affect his rankings in anyway.....and probably brings in very good link partners.

Think of your site as an inter-twined ball of rubber bands all connecting to each other...then you have this links section dangling off to the side only connected via the home page. That's going to be noticeable in the se's analysis of your site.

Remember Spirographs? "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph" ...they are a great example of site architecture....everything converges at the middle...the home page...and everything comes back to the middle...all the lines are eventually connected.

An agenda? Morgan and company are giving it away...how can Rolex even make that type of comment

[Apollo Madison]

I've had luck on search engine rankings when I have original content on my site and I have links from sites that the the SEs consider to be "legitimate." So links that are generated by sites that exist purely to link one site to another, particularly the batch-type links, aren't as valuable as they used to be. It seems that the SE are discounting the links generated by these sites. So one-way links are the most valuable, but the originating site must be a good site in and of itself.

Thanks.

Apollo Madison
Real Estate Investor
http://www.seattlelandlord.net