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It's Finally Here - Live Search

By: Michael Pedone
2006-09-14

MSN officially launched its long-anticipated proprietary search engine on September 11th, 2006 - Live Search. There's nothing new or sparkly about Live.com.

Link: Live Search

The home page is barren of all bells and whistles. This familiar, no-nonsense entry point into web search was pioneered by Google at a time when bells and whistles (and portals) were the norm.

Microsoft's launch of their new search engine is another step towards claiming a larger stake in the burgeoning search market. Nielsen/Netratings reports that MSN has about 10% of the search market share, falling way behind Google's 49.4% and Yahoo's 23%. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can move the needle a bit now that they have their own technology in place.

This article on Internetnews.com lists some of the differentiating factors of MSN's new service from Google and Yahoo. The local search and image search features are touted as being particularly interesting.

Our own focus so far is in understanding the algorithm so we can provide in-depth optimization recommendations to eTrafficJams clients. MSN's Live Search has it's own blog, which offered a few kernels of insight.
  • Keep Urls Simple. URLs with more than 5 query parameters have a very low chance of being crawled, much less landing in their index.


  • Keep site structure flat. Deep pages are less likely to get crawled than surface pages (Per MSN: "if we need to traverse through eight pages of your site finding leaf pages that nobody but yourself points to, MSNBot might choose not to go that far.") This also hints that reciprocal links are of some value.


  • Create a site map.


  • Submit your URL directly to MSN.


  • Make sure MSN doesn't consider your site is spam by reviewing their Site owner's help guidelines. Here are a few spammy tactics listed by MSN: "dirty javascript redirects, stuffing alt text, white on white links, off topic links etc." We pulled some things from the Site Owners Help pages to get you started:

    1. Avoid broken links on any given page

    2. Use 301 redirects for a permanently moved page

    3. Use a Refresh meta tag to redirect your site address

    4. Optimize content for your relevant keywords (on-page optimization)

    5. Keep page file size to 150k or less

    6. Keep topics focused - one topic per page is recommended

    7. Make sure all pages are within 1-3 clicks from the home page
The good news is that if you've done any SEO at all on your web site, then it's probably well on its way to being MSN friendly.

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About the Author:
Michael Pedone is the President / CEO of eTrafficJams.com, a search engine optimization and website marketing company http://www.etrafficjams.com located in Clearwater, Florida that specializes in getting targeted, eager-to-buy traffic to your site. You can catch him blogging at: http://www.etrafficjams.com/blog/.


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