Beta - MSNBot - Reviewed
WebProWorld"MSNBot the beta-search spider works very much like GoogleBot, looking for many of the same site elements including incoming links, contextual relationships between linked documents, and overall site context.
MSNBot also seems to be interested in keyword-enriched titles and seems especially interested in anchor text.
MSNBot, like GoogleBot and Slurp finds sites for its index by following links from one page to another within or between sites.
A check of backlinks, or links recognized by MSNBot as being relevant to a specific site almost always shows much higher numbers than a similar check on Google or Yahoo leading us to conclude that, for the time being at least, MSNBot does not filter links to the same degree as its rivals.
One of the biggest improvements MSN(beta) brags about is its ability to figure out the context of individual paragraphs found on a page and apply that context as a "relevancy" factor against pages that might be linked to from that paragraph.
MSNBot likes well defined and functioning link paths within your website
NB for highly dynamic or commerce driven sites, use static URLs to link to products in your database and do whatever is necessary to avoid tracking systems that append unique user IDs to URLs.
Assuming navigation issues have been taken care of, websites that use keyword phrases in titles, anchor text, and early in the page content are doing very well in MSN(beta)'s index. We do not know for sure what MSNBot thinks of meta tags however we recommend using the basic description and keywords meta tags along with robot exclude text when necessary. MSNBot, basically likes clean code with good, common sense SEO. In a previous article, we republished the guidelines MSN posted to the MSN(beta) search site.
The article summarises the MSNBot Guidelines:
Incoming links from other websites with keyword-enriched anchor text used to phrase the links
Easily read code that has been W3C validated
Address one topic per page
Keep your page size reasonable, 150kb is the maximum size recommended in the MSN guidelines
Apply keyword phrases to well written sentences early in the code. Don't use techniques such as keyword stuffing or invisible text.
Use a sitemap to ensure that every page in your site is open to MSNBot.
Other post sagree that MSN Beta seems pretty stable now.
posted by Jen @ 4:43 PM
<< Home