Yahoo rocks, MSN stinks

MSN is extremely fast with the indexing. My site's only been up 3-plus weeks and half of content has already been indexed. Compare this with Yahoo's 8 pages and no listing in Google at all. Unfortunately no one uses MSN so it's all moot, isn't it?

 

I get decent traffic from MSN. It is better than not showing at all.

 

MSN isn't awful (worse than froogle !!, but at least it shows up in the stats), but the traffic just doesn't convert for me. I don't get that. It converts about 50% as well as google, which is worse than yahoo. Are people who use MSN for search webtv owners? I don't get who they are.

 

Perhaps they are people who are just discovering the internet for the first time.

 

So far I've not seen any traffic from MSN.

 

Yes, msn traffic is awful at it's best. However, i think it we should still be thinking about it in the near future. Well..you know that microsoft wants to domintae everything. I believe one day ( dunno when), msn will be a strong rival to google.

However ... at the current time, it is something i myself seem to neglect. I love Yahoo. This is the one engine that continously give me visitors when i'm being sanboxxed by google.

 

I'd just be happy to be in MSN at all. I have a ton of trouble getting it to pick up my sites -- even Googster is picking up new sites faster than MSN.

 

Studies have shown that Google users are much more Internet savvy, however the vast majority of users are not expert users. Most people (especially the baby boomer generation which is the demographic with most of the wealth in the US) are fairly new to the Internet. And since MSN is also the largest ISP in the world (recently passing AOL), that means that MSN is likely their default homepage. Even when you download and install Microsoft products it always tries to set msn.com as your default homepage. MSN is the second most visited site on the Internet (second to Yahoo) and they have been #1 and #2 for the last 5 years. Google was usually bouncing around the top 5 or 10 is now firmly at #3 ahead of Ebay, Amazon, and AOL.com.

You would also be surprised to find that the majority of Internet users can not tell the difference between the top listed "Sponsored" listings and the natural listings. MSN and Google do not number their results like Yahoo does so the average person thinks the sponsored results are the top ranked sites. The little "sponsored site/links" text is way off the right of the screen.

MSN is still way behind but don't count them out. They are still learning to walk when it comes to the search industry but they will continue to improve. One thing you can be assured of is that Microsoft isn't merely dabbling in the search industry, they are hell bent on dominating it and have the resources to put towards continued development. Whether they become the #1 player or not remains to be seen but they will continue grow in marketshare and improve their service.

If you are serious about a long term SEO strategy then it would be foolish to ignore MSN just because it is not producing the same traffic right now.

 

MSN drives around a 1/4 - 1/3 of each of my sites traffic (a higher % of course for the sites that are still sandboxed)

I use the time when my sites are sandboxed out of Googles serps to try things out with ad placement navigation, calls to action etc. on the limited traffic I get from MSN so if something doesn't work - no big loss [I've never had much luck for very long in Yahoo ]

The preperation I do with minimal traffic pays off great when the real traffic starts to flow - better than waiting until you have loads of traffic to figure out hy your CTR and conversions suck.

 

it's Google for me. I get the best searches from it.