Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search

Thursday, April 01, 2004

MSN new lookMSN's New Search Page Look: "MSN announced a redesign for its MSN Search service last week, a cosmetic change that helps the service comply with U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recommendations about labeling paid placement results."MSN Search -- More Useful Everyday

Main Results Continue From Yahoo

The main listings on MSN Search's results page, those under the "Web Pages" heading, are from Yahoo. These listings combine pages found by Yahoo's crawling of the Web and content obtained via Yahoo's content acquisition program, some of which involves paid inclusion.

After the July change, main listings at MSN will continue to come from Yahoo but will no longer have a "Web Pages" tag.

At some point in the future, MSN expects to replace this data with data found by its own crawler. That's likely to happen toward the end of this year.

If MSN is cleaning things up in terms of paid placement, why isn't it doing more to disclose paid inclusion?

MSN is already in compliance with FTC recommendations. As long as paid inclusion doesn't provide a ranking boost, which MSN supplier Yahoo says is the case, paid inclusion need only be disclosed on a search engine's help pages.

MSN currently does this through an about link next to the Web Pages heading on the results page. It leads to this explanation:

Within Web Page results, there may be links where the Web site owners have paid for either expedited review of their site or paid for clicks to their site. These sites are ranked using the normal algorithm applied to all links within each section, with no change in rank due to payment.