Well it sure does for me, and FAST! Just about couple of months ago traffic from MSN/Live.com was not very significant and Google traffic was king. Then this month came this dreadful Google PR update and while Google traffic didn't drop for me, Windows Live traffic literally skyrocketed! Now I get around 30% more traffic from Windows Live than from Google. Has anyone else noticed the same trend? If yes, any ideas what could be causing this and whether it may indicate that Google may be losing its primate as a search engine traffic source and therefore also as the search engine of choice? Funny thing is, I don't like Microsoft. I despise their practices, yet I am somehow happy to see Live.com overtake Google as my traffic source because I am growing quite weary of depending on Google so much. Cheers
no.. its not happened with me atleast.. On my websites.. traffic has not even affected after the PR update.. but wish that it increases (LOL.. who won't wish that )
I am seeing the same change. Until May 07, Live/MSN Search totalled 1.8% of hits onto my sites. By October 07, Live/MSN is now over 33%. I am assuming this is because the new IE browser has a search box with Live as the default.
Not really, as stated Google traffic didn't change that much. Besides it's enough to just compared Windows Live before and now to see a drastic increase, no need to compare with Google. It's 3 years and 3 months old.
Have your sales actually increased? The reason I ask is that the Live bot is popping up in awstats as referrers, when in fact its just their bot. The spammed the heck out of me about a month ago. According to my log files, I was getting hundreds of visitors for each of the search terms below, and they were all coming from Live. doctors vacations coolers etc. Imagine any generic word, and according to my stats that's what my visitors typed in before coming to my Website. My keyword search stats in my logfiles were fried because of Live. I had thousands upon thousands of these "fake visitors" screwing up my log files and eating my bandwidth. Personally, I think Live should be renamed to Dead. lol All jokes aside, I get more Google image search traffic then I get from Live/MSN.
I am seeing real traffic from Live/MSN, and not just the MSN bots. At the same time, my Google traffic is increasing too. I have never attempted to SEO for MSN, since it has been a dead search engine for years. That may be changing now. I am getting an additional 30% of Search traffic for the last two months. Oh, and Mahmood, these sites are 3+ years old. Maybe the new algo is working in my favor
I'm not selling anything on those sites, but.. well, it's hard to say. The general awstats show overall traffic increase, probably because of Live. Now whether this is just a bot or not I can't be sure. Awstats does display bots separately from hits coming from a search engine, but it's true that MSNbot could be screwing it up anyway.. So it can be either I suppose.
Hmmm... one might think since Google, MSN, and Yahoo all used different methods for scoring and rating sites, that the optimal strategy would be to optimize their site for all 3. By this, I mean you should create 3 different websites on different variations of the original domain, and optimize one for google, one for msn, and one for yahoo. In the end I would think this would get you the most amount of traffic. On another note, if age is a factor, then the new websites will get pushed even further down the line. Sarcastic business tip: 5 years before you decide to go into business for yourself, but the domain and hosting and put a generic site up... so when you do in fact go into business your MSN ranking will be good. Content should always be king. Maybe that is why google is king.