Anyone having problems with the new update.
I made some changes to a few of my sites and they are all back in #1 and 2
for my key phrases.

No problems here.

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Social Networking for Realtors ~ Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Arizona Manufactured Housing

Yes I just realized I dropped ranking for all my key phrases and I'm not even on page 1 anymore. ANybody have any idea why this might be?

If I cant even stay on top of msn I'm thinking it may be fruitless to attempt #1 for google. What do you think?

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Dana Point Real Estate - Laguna Niguel Real Estate - San Clemente Real Estate

It's funny. So many people on this forum think MSN is the least of their worries since they don't get traffic from it. I guess it's an area thing as I get a large proportion of traffic from MSN followed by Google & last by Yahoo. My Oak Lawn REW site has some top positions in Google yet around 77% of my traffic comes from MSN! I have so many #1 positions in MSN I give up checking after searching for different kw phrases.

Tim, I hate giving seo advice because I'm never sure what I'm doing right, but your homepage doesn't have much content to it and your main keywords are in your title and maybe twice on the page itself, and in both instances it's towards the top. You might want to try to add the phrase in once more towards the bottom (which is something I'm not sure is correct, so anyone that knows better feel free to chime in).

I've mentioned that on my Cook County site I have some of my top areas appear as links on the side nav menu plus once again on the bottom. Those bottom links look messy to me and maybe I just need to set them up a little neater in table format or something. However, I hate removing them because I do have some top MSN position for some of these areas. Sometimes the page that shows is the actual city page but sometimes it is the homepage (sometimes both).

I would worry if you can't rank in MSN as I have two sites that I haven't even been working on that are on the first page. Of course, the specific towns and phrases are probably not as difficult to optimize for as what you're going for. I do have some competition for those kw's so it's not completely uncommon phrases.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S.

Hey Morgan,

You have any idea why I had such a significant drop in msn? We have more backlinks as ever. Are they just not very valuable anymore?

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Dana Point Real Estate - Laguna Niguel Real Estate - San Clemente Real Estate

Tim
It probably has to do with all your links are coming from link pages.
Also many links are from the same sites as other sites designed by realestatewebmasters.
You need better links.

From an MSN perspective (What this thread is about) links are not that important, it is much more about onpage.

I had a look at your site, and I see you have made a lot of changes (Including the colors) - but from a ranking perspective I don't see how they would hurt you in MSN. You basically just added more links to price bands, featured listings etc on each page right? Maybe MSN doesnt like all those pricing links on there or something

Judy, I used to think you needed a ton of content to rank on MSN until http://www.finehomesofhiltonhead.com - check hilton head real estate you will see them around #2

Now I just think its about title, description and a decent density (whether you have a lot or a little text)

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Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [Of Google] will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. Google.com

Do you think its valuable for me to continue getting reciprocal links? Or should I focus on content and one way links? I'm in the #100's for a lot of my keywords I want in google but I'm not clear if reciprocal links are even the main seo tactic now.

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Dana Point Real Estate - Laguna Niguel Real Estate - San Clemente Real Estate

Reciprocal links do not help at all. You need to get some one way links from some realtors.

Your online content looks ok for MSN, MSN is penalizing sites with to many keywords on there homepage and to much optimization. So all you need is links.
I changed a few of my sites and they shot up up to #1 and 2.
But I had the links already.

I'll have to disagree with you here... MSN places a lot of value on the amount of links back to your site... including the spammiest of links - bad neighborhoods, blog comment spam, site-wides, etcetera...

MSN is also a sucker for keywords in the domain name, whether it's in the top-level, subdomain, directory, subdirectory, or all of the above...

As you mentioned, KWs in the title and description are obviously a factor... and I think you are on point in regards to the KW density...

The immaturity of MSN's algo is obvious...

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---cK

CK Chung is an independent SEO consultant who provides premium Holistic SEO services, including services specific to Real Estate SEO. You can find his alter-ego, Kid Disco, spouting off on his SEO blog at SEOdisco.