big drop in MSN

does anyone see that or its just me? Fell down over 100 positions.

I've been watching four phrases for a few months now and they were performing very well in a pretty competitive nitch. About 4-5 days ago have made a change in my title - changed one word. Basically I had one main keyphrases in the title, but this word wasn't a part of it, so I took it out and added another word that created another competitive keyphrase within existing keywords. So, next day I'm ranking unexpectedly well on Google and even Yahoo - MSN hasn't crawled my new titles yet - odd since their spider was visiting me very often. I'm still climbing up in G and somewhat went down in Y! for the first phrase, but yesterday and today I noticed that my impressions in AdSense went down big time, but CTR increased almost twice - so I started checking on my rankings and saw that I went down in MSN big time for 3 of the phrases and only one of them went down one position. This one has new Title, but the other ones still has old title in MSN cache.

Just wandering if title change did affecte my rankings... even though it still shows with the old title in the search. Any ideas? I know I need at least to wait till next crawl may be it will change for good.. but seams like it shouldn't be affected this bad.

What do you think?

 

I had a mega drop in MSN rankings approx 4 days ago but I made some changes to the header of my site so I cannot say for sure if it was an algo change.

 

yeah.. that's how I feel - the change was for better and it is reflecting positively on google so far.. and since MSN didn't show changes in its cache I asume title change not suppose to affect rankings yet... and I would really expect it that bad since most of my sites ranking very well on MSN.

 

The changes I made to my site where for the better as well e.g. moving unimportant page elements to the bottom of HTML and using CSS to position them at the top, but I cannot accept that this would hit my rankings so hard. I can't tell you how much it has affected my Google rankings because I am still in the sandbox after 6 months, aargghh!

 

I went to MSN this morning and typed in really quickly one of my keyphrases and showed up 1.3K results out of usual 45-50K and two of the first results were my pages. I misspelled one word - I searched the code of those pages for misspelling and I searched the whole site for the misspelling - no luck Can someone explain? I have a similar experience in google when I misspelled one word and google cached it, but then I changed it and google updated its cache, but I'm still ranking on the first page for the misspelling even though it was probably half of a year ago if not longer...

 

that was really dumm question. I found it - I had two misspelled link in anchor text on my other site - thanks God both of them are mine and I can fix it
It is still interesting though since the pages that rank on the misspelling are not the once I had wrong links too... very strange... I linked only related pages, but seams like MSN like the other ones...

 

My ranking on MSN has also been hit in the last few days. I made some changes with more keywords but my site has dropped.

I notice that if my site drops from 3rd to 5th I get a lot less traffic. It shows that some people who use search engines are so lazy that they don't even scroll down a bit, just click the first ones they see.

 

I hear that Blagger! The good news, at least for me, is that the rankings are slowly getting better again. I wonder it they are having a mini-Google episode

 

That's funny seo-ireland

As for the 3rd to 5th positions Blagger, I think it's pretty much with all the SEs not only MSN. But, I have to mentiona that there are cases when 2nd and 3rd positions are almost as good as the first. For example I have a site that was #1 on Y! for almost 2 years and now dropped to 2 than to 3 (I didn't really care too much since the traffic is booming). I noticed that Y! hasen't reduce its referrals to me at all. Than I looked at the titles of the resuts ahead of me - they are not comletely reflecting the search phrase and my title contains very popular brand name in capital letters (that is registered by the corp.) so I think that works like those arrows mentioned in the forum. Also you need to remember that % of clicking closer to the fold and below is reduced tremendously. I have a few sites that are ranking on first page on google for the main keyphrases - one is #1 and another one is about #7,8,9 (fluctuating all the time) - if someone showed me the stats and asked me what I think, I would never guess that the second site ranks on the first page in google.

 

btw, my changed made one of my main keyphrases #3 in Y! from #7, so that was for good. I made another change just now - added H1 tags to about over 3K pages (I haven't had it before) - so we'll see how that will work out.

P.S. Very strange - one of my very competitive keyphrases was# 181 on Y! yesterday and #1 today...

 

I have optimized and benefited for a number of minimally competitive keywords in MSN, but for the most competitive keyword I was ranked 63 out of 1.8 million. Today, I am off the radar. I don't get it, no real changes have been made.

 

I see all results are shuffled up in the MSN - some very big authority sites are droped down form first spots to the third pages. Kinda odd. I see another high ranking sites that were top in G, Y! and MSN in my industry and now hanging out with me at 190-200(in MSN)... Y! with its latest Index changes is doing very well for me and Google too. I have a feeling that there is something going on at MSN, but the news is not out yet.

 

i was #3 for my top phrase, made a few on page changes, and BAM - out of the top 1000. Changed it back - went to #2 and holding.

 

I don't consider changing it back yet since my results in Google and Yahoo are much better now thtn before...
What kind of changes did you do?

 

Did you document your changes? This could help others if something happens like that to one of us.

 

did your changes cause invalid HTML errors?

That's a HUGE drop. I've suffered some big hits. Like #3 to #12 and #1 to #12 and #63 to #100.

 

I think MSN made a few changes that came into effect on 1st April.
I noticed a lot of my terms have dropped, some from the first page to nowhere, others down from number 1 but still on the first page. I haven't made any changes at all to my site, it just happened overnight.

The major thing I notice is I am not getting traffic for terms that have been misspelt, those are the terms that have gone from the first page to nowhere and I was getting a lot of traffic from those.

As far as traffic in general from MSN, it is down 50% since the 1st April and not improving .
Yahoo and Google are still the same.