I have launched two websites less than a month ago. One of them got indexed by google and yahoo very fast, and by msn about a week ago. In google and yahoo I'm nowhere near the top 200 positions, but on msn I got at the first and second places for all my main keywords a day or two after being indexed by it. Should I take this as a good sign as that I could expect good positions in google and yahoo as well, or should I not give much importance to it? Thank you!
MSN will put just about anything at the top. I wouldn't take it as a blessing. One day your sites will be at the top, the next day they won't show up at all. It's really chaotic right now. Yahoo is similiar, but it takes alot longer. In a couple of weeks you could see the same thing. Google...well that's just one big mystery
MSN ranks anything with a targeted title tag, no matter what your sites history, incoming link #'s, etc (for now).. Usually the top listings in MSN have title tags that show up exactly as the search queried. If the keyword has little competition, titles and on page optimization are usually enough to give you high rankings there. Yahoo! will rank you strictly for the title tags and on page optimization, but it takes time and incoming links to move up towards respectable rankings. they seem the slowest to update as well, imo. Google says frig your title tags and optimization.. UNLESS you've got strong incoming links, lots of incoming links, an already fairly wide web reach with good standing and useful content and all that jazz. If you already have the power on Google, they will update your rankings after each time a spider comes to view the changes (daily). If you don't already have this, you may also have the aging delay to hamper you, if your url is new to them. To sum up, MSN results don't mean too much as far as the others go. But it's nice to have your foot in the door somewhere
I think the short answer is No, you can't take what one SE does and extrapolate it to onto the others.
Thank you for your answers. I did not think it could be directly compared, but I had the doubt if it could be taken as a good sign. I will just wait for a while and keep working on my sites and see if I'm able to have any good results with yahoo and google.
BTW latest survey shows 50% of search traffic is Google, 25% Yahoo, so MSN must be down there somewhere, though their self-reported traffic is about even with Google (gee, Microsoft lying? Never!)