Gunning for Google

Gunning for Google

By Stephan Spencer
Catalog Age
02/08/05 5:00 AM PT

One specific optimization tactic that works well on MSN Search is known as Google bombing. With this tactic, if you can get sites that are considered important to link to a particular page with specific link text, that page can do well in MSN Search even if the words used in the link text don’t appear anywhere on the page itself.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is gunning for Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) . Unhappy that its MSN Search is only the third most popular search engine, Microsoft has feverishly been working on its own search technology to replace Yahoo’s Inktomi (Nasdaq: INKT) engine, which had been powering MSN Search.

Microsoft’s internally built MSN Search engine launched officially earlier this week.

A lot is at stake here for Web marketers. MSN Search currently has a 15 percent share of the search engine market, which will probably grow over time as Microsoft leverages its installed base of Windows users, embedding MSN Search into users’ desktop in a new edition of Windows codenamed Longhorn. What’s more, MSN Search is already in beta for integration into MSN Messenger, its instant messaging application. Microsoft also has access to PDAs , mobile phones and interactive TV. You can be sure that the new MSN Search will start to appear on all these devices.

Optimizing on MSN
Recently Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer stated that his company is “hell-bent and determined” to challenge Google for leadership in Internet search. Given Microsoft’s resources, it has as good a chance as any of achieving this goal.

Happily, it doesn’t appear to be difficult for search engine optimizers to achieve high rankings on the new MSN Search. The tried-and-true optimization tactics appear to work quite well. These include keyword-rich title tags.

The text within your page title is given more weight by the search engines than any other text on the page; keywords at the beginning of the title tag are given the most weight. Leading with keywords relevant to your business and popular with searchers can make your page appear more relevant in a search.

Relevant and popular keywords should also be included in each page’s body copy, particularly near the top. But don’t go overboard — ideally you should incorporate 200-250 words on each page so that the search engines have enough “meat” to determine the theme of the page.

Google Bombing on MSN
“Link popularity” — the number of links that point to your site — is a key criterion that search engines use for ranking pages, but with an important twist: There’s a weighting factor placed on each link to take into account the importance of the page linking to you. Google has given a name to its importance-scoring algorithm: PageRank. Both MSN Search and Yahoo appear to use similar importance-scoring systems. As such, links from “important” sites are of critical importance to your search visibility.

Search engines associate the anchor text in the hyperlink as highly relevant to the page being linked to. So use good keywords in the link text to help the engine better ascertain the theme of the page to which you are linking. But keep the link text relatively succinct and tightly focused on just one keyword or key phrase.

One specific optimization tactic that works well on MSN Search is known as Google bombing. With this tactic, if you can get sites that are considered important to link to a particular page with specific link text, that page can do well in MSN Search even if the words used in the link text don’t appear anywhere on the page itself.

Now that there are three major competing engines, you may be tempted to create separate versions of your Web pages tailored to the unique attributes of each. In a word: Don’t. First, it smacks of search engine spamming. Second, it will prove to be ineffective, because it will dilute the PageRank importance of your pages. Think of it this way: If you create three versions of a page, nobody is going to link to all three versions — they will link only to one. Thus, all the links won’t be aggregating to the one definitive version of your page. The volume of links will be split up among three.

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