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.
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
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.
Any common sense rule that applies to SPAM on other search engines applies at MSN(beta) as well.
If you have any question feel free to email Eric at info@premierpsot.biz.
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