I find it really odd about the difference in ranking between google and MSN for one of my sites. For the Term Starting Over. My website site Starting Over Talk comes up #2 in MSN but #246 on google. I am not complaining at all because I have just pretty much been playing around with this site and haven't even tried to optimize it for google. I am an just amazed at the difference between MSN and Google.
Some of differences between Google and MSN are 1. Google takes time into consideration while MSN does not seem to do so. If it does, not so much. 1.2. If you have a new website, it is very difficult to rank well in Google, while this is not such a big deal for MSN. 2. Google appears to take theme into consideration while MSN does not seem to care much about theme. 3. Google does not seem to value sig links much while MSN does. For example, your sig link should be working for MSN while it is probably doing a lot less for Google.
In addition to what ohcnetwork said For the term "Starting Over" the number of competing sites in MSN= 341,305 Google=560,000 So your competing in a smaller pond and this may change once MSN indexes more pages. It's less a matter of SEO than more a matter of having less competition for the phrases.
I would image Google highly values the age of the site (time of first spider)..MSN doesn't as it just started...could be wrong though
i think you're defintely correct about this. they also value backlinks and anchor text more than google too (i think)... in addition, they display updated backlinks everyday (maybe everyother day) ... forum sigs do help a lot w/msn.
I think that it's about the backlinks. It is my opinion that G00gle will penalize a site for backlinks that are spammy or unrelated whereas MSN doesn't penalize in this way. AmCy