What would you do if you were tasked with designing a new search
engine?
You have all the resources the world can offer and the certain
knowledge that your project is so important to your employer
that mountains, molehills, companies, code and really comfy
office chairs will be moved, built or acquired to meet your
needs, no questions asked. Your boss demands a product that is
better than best and, having failed to notice how overwhelmingly
essential search would become back when he came to dominate
everything else, appears ready to back your project with
missionary zeal and Machiavellian maneuvering. The cold hard
truth is, the future of one of the largest corporations in the
world, owned incidentally by the world's wealthiest man, may
well rest on your shoulders. In this scenario, there are no
obstacles, only the challenge of beating Google at Google's best
game. Whoa.... MSN released the beta version of their long awaited proprietary
search engine earlier this quarter. Beta releases are the
software world's version of a dress rehearsal. Mistakes will
happen, even in the best productions, and the beta stage is the
place to field-test a product, finding and fixing inevitable
problems before the real, commercial version of the product is
introduced. MSN(beta) search has seen its share of bumps over
the past few weeks including a short period when it appeared the
search tool had crashed. Regardless of any minor mishaps in its
first weeks, MSN(beta) Search shows very good results generated
from a database of approximately 5 billion spidered websites it
began compiling over a year ago. While MSN(beta) and the search
tool found at MSN.Com are different search tools delivering very
different sets of results, the results generated by MSN(beta)
will eventually replace the Inktomi based listings shown on
MSN.Com. That's when the real fun will begin. Please note, as
other commentators have pointed out, this is a BETA version and
likely to change in coming weeks before the undisclosed live
release date. When told to build a better mousetrap, MSN engineers set their
goals fairly high and approached the problem from the most
logical point possible. They seem to have looked at the best
ideas everyone else has come up with and tried to incorporate
them into their search tool. The results are better then
expected with highly relevant site listings that have been
compared to earlier versions of Google's index. That makes sense
given that MSNBot the beta-search spider works very much like
GoogleBot, looking for many of the same site elements including
incoming links, contextual relationships between linked
documents, and overall site context. 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.
The majority of sites in MSN(beta)'s index were found by MSNBot
as it followed links from sites it had already visited. 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. Subsequent
paragraphs on the same page might be about totally different
topics without undermining the contextual relevancy of the links
found in the previous paragraph. Google tends to compare
relevancy on a page to page basis, making it more difficult to
address a wide ranging topic on one page. 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. For database driven sites, this
can be accomplished by changing the "footer" attribute on the
template that creates the base-pages. There is an important
thing to note here, especially for webmasters of highly dynamic
or commerce driven sites, use static URLs to link to products
in your database and do whatever is necessary to avoid tracking
systems that append unique user IDs to URLs. This article is not going to provide a lot of details around
these elements as some or even much of what is written is subject
to sudden change (this is a beta version after all), and the
beta version simply hasn't been around long enough to express
reliable ideas in writing yet. Once you have ensured that
MSN(beta)'s spider can travel from one end of your site to
another, and has a way into your site from an outside reference,
take a look at the following elements of your site.
MSNBot seems to really like the techniques used by SEOs at
StepForth. StepForth pays a lot of attention to keyword
enrichment of the basic but critical elements of a 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. We
do not know for sure what MSNBot thinks of meta tags however we
recommend using the basic description and keywords meta tags
along with robot exclude text when necessary. MSNBot, basically
likes clean code with good, common sense SEO. In a previous
article, we republished the guidelines MSN posted to the
MSN(beta) search site. MSNBot Guidelines, at a glance: - Incoming links from other websites with keyword-enriched
anchor text used to phrase the links.
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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC. Jim works with a limited group of
clients and provides consultancy services to StepForth Search
Engine Placement (http://www.stepforth.com). He has worked as an
SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his
experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements.
Hedger can be reached at jim.hedger@gmail.com
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