12/23/04 Research on the New Beta Version of MSN Search

MSNBot also seems to be interested in keyword-enriched titles and seems especially interested in anchor text.
MSNBot, like GoogleBot and Slurp finds sites for its index by following links from one page to another within or between sites.

A check of backlinks, or links recognized by MSNBot as being relevant to a specific site almost always shows much higher numbers than a similar check on Google or Yahoo leading us to conclude that, for the time being at least, MSNBot does not filter links to the same degree as its rivals.

In other words, relevancy does not appear to be as strong a factor with this version of MSN(beta) than it is with Google, at first glance anyway.

One of the biggest improvements MSN(beta) brags about is its ability to figure out the context of individual paragraphs found on a page and apply that context as a "relevancy" factor against pages that might be linked to from that paragraph.

As with Google and Yahoo's spiders, MSNBot likes well defined and functioning link paths within your website. Providing a clear and well explained path for MSNBot to follow is critical to good rankings. The easiest way to accomplish this is to establish a text-based sitemap page appended to your website and be certain there is a link to that sitemap page on each of the other pages in your site.

Assuming navigation issues have been taken care of, websites that use keyword phrases in titles, anchor text, and early in the page content are doing very well in MSN(beta)'s index.

MSNBot Guidelines, at a glance:

• Incoming links from other websites with keyword-enriched anchor text used to phrase the links.
• Easily read code that has been W3C validated.
• As with all search engines, best results are found when you only address one topic per page.
• Keep your page site reasonable, 150kb is the maximum size recommended in the MSN guidelines.
• Apply keyword phrases to well written sentences early in the code. Don't use techniques such as keyword stuffing or invisible text.

Use a sitemap to ensure that every page in your site is open to MSNBot.

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