I don't know what happened but I own 13 websites, and literally overnight sometime in the month of February about 10 of my sites are now within the 1st to 5th ranking for major keywords (most are #1 including one that just beat out a 5 year old site even though my site was only 9 months old and not much authority). Im talking keywords that could get tens of thousands of searches on Google. One of those sites had only been in MSN for a little over one month and it got #1 ranking for a keyword that gets 15,000 searches a month on Yahoo(according to overture). Although unfortanutely i don't get that level of traffic on Live cause Live doesn't get as much as Yahoo. So the only thing that could explain this, is there was a major algorithm change? Anyone else notice a huge surge in MSN/Live traffic in february/march?
I haven't seen it yet. anyway it could happen not because the algorithm change but your site finally have been aligned with the algorithm. there are certain condition with any algo so you might have passed the condition or rules. but who knows. algo is a secret.
My experience is that MSN doesn't care how tenured a website is, nor does it care much about incoming links. It cares about keywords in the URL, so for my biggest keywords, even though my site is 11 years old, I'm getting beat out by a guy who has less than 10 incoming links and just built his site last year. This is for a search term that has 80,000 searches a month in google. This other guy is ranked #3 somehow in MSN. I don't thinks it's an algo change, I think that you have the odds in your favor if you name your website after the keywords you're aiming to optimize.
Thanks eric. I agree, from the looks of it that is basically what appears to be a major contributing force.
Msn seems to always fluctuate alot.. My rankings normaly go up and down ive kind of gotten used to it.
The fact that both my old and new sites seemed to have these great rankings all the sudden lately, tells me it HAS to be algorithmic change. I think i may be noticing it more than others because Ive magically cracked into figuring out the jist of their algorithm. (Sorry won't tell you exactly what I think it is). But There is no other way to explain both my old and new are getting these unbelievable rankings, when my sites haven't changed that much over the last few months and some of my sites were made around just new years. Its too coincidental that the majority of my 13 sites are all the sudden at the top for very good keywords.