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There’s something of a buzz right now with MSN supposedly banning people for reciprocal linking. True or not I feel this is typical of why MSN is stuck in third place, you can’t be a leader playing catchup. MSN Won’t Win Playing Catchup »
Sphere ItI know you search engine folks got together a while ago and agreed on a standard to help fight blog spam. Problem is it didn’t work and it only satisfied whiney cat bloggers. Now if you had involved some of the people who were in the industry things might have turned out differently (see classic old school Nick W Threadwatch post The solution to blog spam) you might have had a little more success. I know some of you googlers read my blog, and because I’ve got a head full of crazy genius ideas I’m going to make the case for the adoption of a new parameter.
Making a Case for the Ignore Parameter »
Sphere ItSince my experiment in reputation management is actually getting much more interesting than I planned I thought I should go back and do a proper writeup.
Reputation Management - Case Study, Part I »
Sphere ItSo I did a little test of some domain spamming reputation management for a friends company. I used the MSN URL submission tool and in less than 30 days I “owned” the 9 of the top 10 spots. There are only 250,000 other pages listed so it’s not really competitive by any measurement, but man sure made him happy. So far only 2 have grabbed hold in Google and only 1 in Yahoo.
Sphere ItOk if you’re looking for an invite to get into the MSN Adcenter drop something in the comments I still have about 6 left to go around. First come, first served.
Sphere ItIn the past week Google played catch-up with MSN AdCenter by offering Adwords Targeting based on demographics ( see Google AdWords Help Center: What is demographic site selection? and Targeting as a Strategy). Maybe I spent a little to much time in AOL chat rooms in my youth (yo ASL roomies), but I don’t place a lot of stock in the accuracy of online demographic data.
Will the Real Online Demographics Please Stand Up »
Sphere ItIf you’re looking for travel tips don’t use MSN, they think you’re looking for trips instead
Orlando Vacation Tips
California Vacation Tips
Ireland Vacation Tips
This is particularly bothersome as I’m bidding on about 20 variations of [location tips] in MSN. What’s even more curious is those words are my best converting words in Google.
(screen shot after the jump)
Sphere ItDear MSN AdCenter PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, DROP THE PRETTY PICTURES AND FUNKY GRAPHS AND JUST WORK IN FIREFOX DAMMIT!
Next how about just a big old text area to let me drop my keywords in, I don’t want to import from some funky excel sheet, or some other mumbo jumbo.
I’ll make it real simple STOP MAKING ME USE YOUR OTHER PRODUCTS WHEN I WANT TO SPEND MY MONEY TO ADVERTISE WITH YOU.
rant over.
Sphere ItSearch Engines and ranking algorithm’s are evolving, in fact many of them are coming close to simulating artificial intelligence and exhibiting distinct personality traits. What better way to explain these personalities than to use an example everyone can relate to their high school teachers.
If Search Engines Were High School Teachers »
Sphere ItSo with all the big deal that Matt Cutts made about buying text links you’d think the Googlers would be able to filter pages out of the SERPS that are clearly paid advertisements like 1,2,3. You can see that they are indexed and are starting to rank (thank you very much Google Alerts). Nothing against the products on the pages, but clearly they don’t have any meaningful content and aren’t much different than the other 50 million thin affiliate pages out there, except that they are on MSN.
Sphere ItIn what may turn out to be a PR nightmare Yahoo admits to not wanting to be number 1 in search
Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance
“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”
Yahoo: Yea We Suck and We Don’t Give a Damn! »
Sphere ItAdd this to the list of things MSN needs to fix before before June. Like most people I wake up and after checking my email I check my stats from the previous day. Depending on what they day holds in store this usually happens somewhere between 6 am and 11 am. I’m in the MSN AdCenter Beta Program and am trying a few things to see what works. I’ve been noticing that MSN reports for the previous day are never online for me in the morning. To be honest I have the same problem with Overture, however I have a workaround, by just going to intra-day activity and getting the figures there. To date I’m unable to find a workaround for MSN. This is particularly bothersome if you are engaging in any PPC arbitrage.
Categories:( ppc | ppc | msn | msn | sem | sem)
Sphere ItI’ll admit I don’t use my Hotmail account for much of anything anymore but here’s a screen shot of what the new MSN Live email screen looks like. It works pretty much like an Ajax style Gmail. MSN Live Email Screen Shot »
Sphere ItOilman has a review of the MSN AdCenter up. I finnally managed to sign in, my review will be somewhat less enthusiastic.
In MSN’s defense this is a beta system so I could deal with it being rough around the edges. However FORCING ME to use IE simply makes my blood boil.
Technorati Tags: msn, msn.adcenter, search.engine.marketing
Sphere ItMy niece who is really a wonderful sweet little girl, has a very small menu of acceptable foods. She will eat cheerios, pancakes, or eggs (scrambled only) for breakfast. For lunch and dinner the list of acceptable foods includes mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, steak, hot dogs, French fries and one or two other things that escape me at the present moment. However when you come to my house for dinner you are exposed to a wide variety of foods. For example the rice and grains in my pantry right now are cous cous, risotto, quinoa, basmati, and jasmine.
So what does the eating habits of children have to do with personalized search? Personalized Search and My Niece »
Sphere ItOilman did okay when he signed up for MSN AdCenter, but I keep getting errors. Part of the problem seems to be I’m using Roboform to fill in the data which isn’t triggering the javascript calls to prefill the form fields. When I put my billing info in it throws error code [1] and tells me to contact support, however there is no email or phone number on the page to use … sigh.
Technorati Tags: MSNAdCenter, MSN
Sphere ItSEO Case Study: Optimal Title Structure
Experiment: To determine what the optimal structure is for a title soley for page ranking.
Hypothesis: Page titles are one the most important on page ranking factors, and achieving the best layout will help a page rank for it’s desired phrase. I believe that that [Keyword Phrase : Title] will rank higher than any other construct, followed by [Keyword Phrase] in isolation.
Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study »
Sphere ItSEO Case Study: Outbound Links
Experiment: To determine if outbound links help a page rank for a term
hypothesis: By linking out to other websites you improve your “hub score” and become a resource for a particular search term (see Hilltop algorithm).
Background: One of the questions that gets asked fairly frequently in search engine forums is do outbound links help you rank, and if they do what is the best way to structure the outbound links. Personally I’m a big believer in outbound links, not only do I support and endorse an interconnected web, but linking out helps you make friends. However the question is from a purely algorithmic standpoint do outbound link help or hurt you? SEO Case Study: Outbound Links »
Sphere It
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