MSN is very fast to rank a site. I am working with a site that is less than a month old and ranks at the top for one of the main terms I targeted.
It's all across the board, and it's really hard to draw conclusions because obviously it's based on your ranking position with each search engine. All my sites rank well with MSN, so a lower yahoo or google ranking for the same keyword is going to affect the percentages, however, I have one particular site that has ranked #1 & #2 in google, yahoo, and MSN for the last year (sometimes yahoo is #1 & #3) for my primary keywords (which being a specialty site, aren't extremely competitive). The site is not a very high traffic site (about 6,000 uniques a month) but it still a good gauge for traffic because the ranking are consistent. It's DMOZ listed and is 7 years old. No paid advertising is done. Just using google, yahoo, and MSN (excluding froogle, and all other search engines) the breakdown is as follows: 71% Google (including aolsearch which is about 2%) 16% Yahoo 13% MSN I would have thought the traffic from yahoo would have been a higher percentage than shows vs MSN, but I rechecked the figures. Not included in the above, traffic from the DMOZ listing was almost nil (under 1%). Even though the site is listed in over a hundred other directories (many were added through the DMOZ listing) the traffic from these sites was very very small. The directories are probably a benefit to the SERP's, but as far as generating traffic, they wouldn't have been worth the time to submit. I've either been given a link, or done a link exchange with about 30 same sector relevant sites and combined, these generated about 10% of total site traffic. We also have all our product listed in froogle, but traffic generated less than 1% of the total traffic. The conversion rate on this traffic is fairly high, so it is worth the inclusion - especially since I use a script that does everything automatically.
That depends on some factors (eg. keyword competition you rank high for on msn, your target market etc.) Now look I'm #1 on a VERY competitive keyword in MSN, but I get only 15% traffic from it. On the other hand, I'm on #2 on Yahoo! and I get nearly 25% of my traffic therefrom. On Google I've been bouncing from #9 to # 11 and still I am getting 50% of my traffic. So I would say it DEPENDS!
For some independant research on the subject: The percentage of online searches done by US home and work web surfers in July 2005 that were performed at a particular search engine. GOOGLE 46% YAHOO 22% MSN 12% IT IS HERE http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451
My most popular site this month MSN is 2nd out of 13 different engines. Google 438 70.1 % MSN 75 12 % -Justin
MSN still like me Monthly stats: MSN 1376 44.72% Yahoo 966 31.39% Google 647 21.03% AltaVista 47 1.53% Dogpile 14 0.45% AskJeeves 10 0.32% Search.com 6 0.19% AOL Search 5 0.16% MyWay 3 0.10% HotBot 1 0.03% Metacrawler 1 0.03% Lycos 1 0.03%
if your sites old then you probably get a lot of traffic from google if your site new then all you get is msn
well as this google update is happening, I have a new site site that is getting over 200 uniques a day from google
around 75% here from msn but now that i have picked up paid adverts its around 40 msn 50 adverts 10 yahoo and other
I had like 20 or more terms I was ranking for in MSN when I got my first one in Google. That one term alone matched all the traffic from MSN.