MSN Won’t Win Playing Catchup
November 20th, 2006 by Michael Gray in MSN, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
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.
At this stage MSN is still having a really hard time dealing with spam issues Google solved 2 or 3 years ago. You can see by looking at searches for viagra, cialis, or phentermine you can see MSN has areal problem separating the link wheat from the chaff. Now one could make the point that the cat and mouse game between Google and SEO’s created this problem, but that’s casting blame and not addressing the problem. MSN needs to sit down and figure out a way to give links their proper editorial weight. They also need to realize the linking world isn’t a walk in the park, it’s filled with intrigue, sabotage, and subterfuge. MSN needs to focus on being better than Google not trying to catch-up to where Google is. However looking at MSN research papers (pdf) pointed out by the digitalghost we can see MSN is focusing more on finding the bad instead of highlighting the good:
Link spam is a particular form of web spam, where the
SEO attempts to boost the PageRank of a web page p by
creating many pages referring to p. However, given that the
PageRank of p is a function of both the number of pages
endorsing p as well as their quality, and given that SEOs
typically do not control many high-quality pages, they must
resort to using a very large number of low-quality pages
to endorse p. This is best done by generating these pages
automatically; a technique commonly known as “link spam”.
and
Most if not all of the SEO-generated pages exist solely to
(mis)lead a search engine into directing traffic towards the
“optimized” site; in other words, the SEO-generated pages
are intended only for the search engine, and are completely
useless to human visitors.
Now while I have created a fair bit of spam in my time, I’ve also created relevant and interesting information that has value to people. In those cases I’m just using optimization to draw attention to it and make sure the search engines find it and understand what it’s about. If search engines and not just MSN did a better job at figuring out and assigning value to the unique and original content, we might be in a better place.
Sphere It
November 20th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Playing catch up is what Microsoft does best. Getting top ranks in MSN still doesn’t matter anyways, so why are they even bothering with the effort anyways
November 28th, 2006 at 8:51 am
MSN is sooooo easy to get top rankings, im page 1 for every keyword and i get little traffic from MSN.