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February 12, 2007

Do Small Pages Rank Better in MSN's Live Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has a theory that smaller pages tend to rank better in Microsoft's Live Search (MSN Search), than larger pages.

Senior member, crobb305 explains:

Has anyone else noticed that very small pages rank highest in MSN? This could explain why doorways and blogspots rank so well. To test this, I reduced text on my homepage down to just a paragraph or so, with links to my internal pages. The content reduced from 22k to about 5k. Within 2 days, the page went from page 5 to page 1 for a competitive phrase.

BillyS, another senior member at WebmasterWorld wrote:

I've seen this too. MSN does not seem to care about the number of words on a page. I saw an "About" page rank very high for a competitive phrase - all the page had was about two paragraphs and the phrase was mentioned once.

Honestly, I have no idea. I am sure there are examples of this going both ways.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.



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posted rustybrick in Microsoft MSN Search at February 12, 2007 8:28 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

That's weird. no wonder why i see a lot of irrelevant search results.

 

Posted by gio at February 12, 2007 09:19

That's really strange. If it is true, it will be difficult to do a global optimization for a website. You choose : good PR or Live visibility ? It would be surprising if MSN penalises Google indicators...

 

Posted by Ramenos at February 12, 2007 09:54

Yes this appears to be true. Something else that is equally strange is that I have noticed, that sites that at running on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) rank higher on MSN’s Live Search than those running on non Apache or Unix/Linux/Solaris etc.

 

Posted by Rob Abdul at February 13, 2007 21:30

I noticed this because of an SEO contest where the overall results in all 3 search engines cumulatively determine the winner. But I did not look at it as a site of the site or size of the page. I just based it on keyword density. I noticed all top pages had a keyword density for the targeted term not going over 3%. This is for the over content keyword density and not broken down to each part since the density in the title is still 100% usually.

When I decided to post stuff not including the targeted keyword of the contest and just post other related things, the rankings went up on MSN.

I started doing this after reading on Webmaster World's discussion on a more strict spam filter seems to be in effect for MSN when they became live search.

 

Posted by Benj Arriola at February 14, 2007 03:16

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