MSN Search Update

MSN announced they are upgrading relevancy and coverage. The increased coverage likely means that more inbound link sources are getting indexed. From looking at rankings of a few of my sites it looks like:

After extensive gaming, Google’s algorithm (it is assumed) shifted from using the quantity of links as an indicator of source authority, to measuring the quality (reputation) of the linker in order to determine relevancy. Gamers are still there though, this time with bigger budgets, and things may be about to change again – most likely to a much more complicated game.

Ad Relevancy & Quality Scores

Google has again and again touted the value of their targeted marketing, but most of the fortune 500 ad dollars are not spent on targeted marketing. A couple weeks ago in a WebmasterWorld thread many advertisers complained about getting killed by another quality score update.

There are two primary factors to getting a page ranked – discovery and relevancy. By and large, search engines are clever creatures, but the very best webmasters will always send out the right signals to gently guide the search engines, and in return receive great rankings for their content.

Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.

Finding true relevance in search results is becoming the new focus of users who are looking to the web for their information needs. For years, the algorithm has been the standard method that search engines have employed to determine relevance and deliver comprehensive results. Social search, however, could represent a change in search philosophy.

Even though Google prides itself with impressive algorithms and the latest in anti-spam technology, are search engines like Google truly succeeding at delivering results that are relevant to search terms?

Dear Kalena…

Thanks,
Adam

Kalena’s Answer:

Dear Adam

As a 28 year-old writing professional, instant messaging is a foregone conclusion to the scope of my work. Every moment of my working day is spent logged in to the IM client that we employ to communicate with each other here in the office, as well as to get quick quotes and information from sources.

SEO Question: I rank #3 in Google for one of my core keywords and yet I am nowhere in it for Yahoo!. Why?

Let me quote some rather startling numbers to you from a recent eye tracking study we did. In the study, we looked at where people first looked on a search results page, where they first scanned a listing, and where they eventually clicked.

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this examination of the Yahoo! trademark policy.

What happened? Webmaster’s, site owners, online businesses and SEO companies everywhere have been desperately trying to decipher the fallout from the longest and most grueling algorithm update in the history of the Internet.

Last week saw the resumption of the search engine size wars in which one major search engine claims to be larger than its rivals, prompting those rivals to rapidly upsize themselves. Yahoo fired the first round at Google, claiming to have over 20 billion objects accessible in their database. Google, which can only claim about 13 billion objects fired back with questions about measurements, basically stating Yahoo was mistaken or misleading in its claims.

I’ve been trying to stay out of the size debate for the last few days while I digest what others have been saying. Now that I’ve done that, I get to react to a few of the things I’ve been reading.

Information Overload

With information overload rapidly killing traditional forms of online advertising – today the key to effective marketing is relevancy.

In a move Google hopes will increase the quality of their ads, the search engine has announced they will be introducing a quality-based minimum bid standard.