Hey everyone, I have a few websites that have been up for only a few months. I seem to be getting some traffic from MSN, but NONE from the other SEs. Is this normal? I see people saying that MSN is quick to index, which probably translates into newer pages being in the SERPs, but I want to be sure that someday the other SEs will include my sites! Is this what other people have seen as well?
Work on getting backlinks so they can find it, and get alot of backlinks and good content so they will want to index it. MSN and Yahoo will index alot faster than Google. Google often takes months before you get descent results for any search terms.
you can easily follow seo contests to see the difference between SE. for example the new Online Casino BTDino contest is for the 1st place in MSN SE. but you can compare results between all SE to see which SE prefers which method. you can track results by looking at the table at: http://www.internet-casinos-information.com/online_casinos.html
same for me, my new site has 1,700 refferals from msn and something like 30 from yahoo and google, like sum1 said above yahoo/google take a lil longer especially if your site is new and in the sandbox.
MSN seems cyclical to me. For instance, one of my major search engine terms has fierce competition sites with 1,000's of backlinks for this exact term alone. My sites are optimized really well for it onpage, but they don't have many backlinks with the specific phrase. Every couple months, I'll pop into the top 10 for the term on MSN, and from there my rank will steadily drop over a week/2 week period until I settle out around page 8 or 9. Another two months rolls around and it happens again. I've observed it 3 times now. Not sure what to make of it, I'm guessing it's some sort of ongoing reindexing they do that has to do with validating backlinks a few at a time. Seems like all the backlinks lose SE value and then slowly regain it as they're validated (or something). All I know is I must have done a hell of a job with onpage optimization because when the backlinks aren't killing me I'm sittin pretty in 4th or 5th spot.
MSN is much quicker to rank a site. I have seen sites get ranked in less than a month. 100 links is good, 1000 is better and 10000 is very nice.
The other thing to consider is that MSN has only a year or so of data to go on (as far as how old a site is), unless they datamine from other places. Google and Yahoo have nearly a decade of their OWN data to play with. So I think relatively new sites (like those running for a year or so) have as much age-value as sites running for 7 or 8 years, since MSN's only been on their own system for a year or so..
It's a tough thing to quantify, because quality makes a big difference. My experience has been lots of one-way links to your site from lots of little sites (related or not) and a few good one-way inbounds from some established related sites does the trick. Of course healthy outbound linking helps too (IMO), which is linking out to good places that are tightly related to your subject only.