MSN Search Results Constantly Changing

November 12th, 2006 by Alan Rabinowitz

We were very big on the updates we have seen with MSN, we felt they were moving in the right direction with Live.com and the suggested search results. We also liked how they had less emphasis on paid search and more on the natural results.

However, we have seen results changing almost weekly for the past 6 months. There’s no consistency in the results. You can rank #1 one week and #15 the next week only to return to #1 the third week and then the 4th week you can be #50 and so on.

The MSN algorithm changes too much for marketers to get excited and tell the world about it. Yahoo and Google hold rankings, and marketers prefer that. People who talk about relevancy, often relate that relevancy to how well they rank. So they, the searchers, tend to be biased in their recommendations. This has helped some of today’s most popular Search Engines gain their popularity early on.

What MSN may have done is pushed off SEOs and site owners from talking about it more as a valued tool. When algorithms shift so regularly, it leads a marketer to assume that either the algorithm is not good and needs lots of work, so rankings should just be ignored.

Obviously no one can brag about their MSN rankings for long since the results change dramatically every week. Which does lead us to believe they are hunting for something. Hopefully we will see the results shift less often. They we will have something else to talk about.
[tags]MSN, MSN Search, Live.com, MSN results, Google, Google.com, Google Search, Google Results, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Results, rankings, seo, seo’s, marketers, algorithm, msn algorithm[/tags]

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