From the category archives:

MSN

MSN Won’t Win Playing Catchup

November 20, 2006

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.

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Making a Case for the Ignore Parameter

July 5, 2006

I 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 [...]

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Reputation Management – Case Study, Part I

June 1, 2006

Since 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.

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MSN Easy Lover

May 19, 2006

So 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 [...]

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MSN AdCenter Invites

March 28, 2006

Ok 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.

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Will the Real Online Demographics Please Stand Up

March 14, 2006

In 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 [...]

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No Travel Tips on MSN

February 23, 2006

If 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)

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MSN AdCenter and Keywords

February 21, 2006

Dear 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 [...]

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If Search Engines Were High School Teachers

February 15, 2006

Search 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.

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MSN Premium Advertiser Pages

January 25, 2006

So 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 [...]

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Yahoo: Yea We Suck and We Don’t Give a Damn!

January 24, 2006

In 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 [...]

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MSN AdCenter:Reporting

January 19, 2006

Add 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 [...]

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MSN Live Email Screen Shot

January 1, 2006

I’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.

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MSN AdCenter Review

December 28, 2005

Oilman has a review of the MSN AdCenter up. I finnally managed to sign in, my review will be somewhat less enthusiastic.

Thanks to comments from one of my readers I found out you can’t sign up when you are using firefox, you need [...]

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Personalized Search and My Niece

December 27, 2005

My 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 [...]

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MSN AdCenter Problems

December 23, 2005

Oilman 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 [...]

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Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study

December 21, 2005

SEO 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 [...]

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SEO Case Study: Outbound Links

December 9, 2005

SEO 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 [...]

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