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MSNBot - Searching For Ways To Make Redmond Rise Again
By Jim Hedger 

What would you do if you were tasked with designing a new search 
engine? 

You have all the resources the world can offer and the certain 
knowledge that your project is so important to your employer 
that mountains, molehills, companies, code and really comfy 
office chairs will be moved, built or acquired to meet your 
needs, no questions asked. Your boss demands a product that is 
better than best and, having failed to notice how overwhelmingly 
essential search would become back when he came to dominate 
everything else, appears ready to back your project with 
missionary zeal and Machiavellian maneuvering. The cold hard 
truth is, the future of one of the largest corporations in the 
world, owned incidentally by the world's wealthiest man, may 
well rest on your shoulders. In this scenario, there are no 
obstacles, only the challenge of beating Google at Google's best 
game. Whoa.... 

MSN released the beta version of their long awaited proprietary 
search engine earlier this quarter. Beta releases are the 
software world's version of a dress rehearsal. Mistakes will 
happen, even in the best productions, and the beta stage is the 
place to field-test a product, finding and fixing inevitable 
problems before the real, commercial version of the product is 
introduced. MSN(beta) search has seen its share of bumps over 
the past few weeks including a short period when it appeared the 
search tool had crashed. Regardless of any minor mishaps in its 
first weeks, MSN(beta) Search shows very good results generated 
from a database of approximately 5 billion spidered websites it 
began compiling over a year ago. While MSN(beta) and the search 
tool found at MSN.Com are different search tools delivering very 
different sets of results, the results generated by MSN(beta) 
will eventually replace the Inktomi based listings shown on 
MSN.Com. That's when the real fun will begin. Please note, as 
other commentators have pointed out, this is a BETA version and 
likely to change in coming weeks before the undisclosed live 
release date. 

When told to build a better mousetrap, MSN engineers set their 
goals fairly high and approached the problem from the most 
logical point possible. They seem to have looked at the best 
ideas everyone else has come up with and tried to incorporate 
them into their search tool. The results are better then 
expected with highly relevant site listings that have been 
compared to earlier versions of Google's index. That makes sense 
given that 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. 
The majority of sites in MSN(beta)'s index were found by MSNBot 
as it followed links from sites it had already visited. 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. In other words, relevancy does not 
appear to be as strong a factor with this version of MSN(beta) 
than it is with Google, at first glance anyway. 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. Subsequent 
paragraphs on the same page might be about totally different 
topics without undermining the contextual relevancy of the links 
found in the previous paragraph. Google tends to compare 
relevancy on a page to page basis, making it more difficult to 
address a wide ranging topic on one page. 

As with Google and Yahoo's spiders, MSNBot likes well defined 
and functioning link paths within your website. Providing a 
clear and well explained path for MSNBot to follow is critical 
to good rankings. The easiest way to accomplish this is to 
establish a text-based sitemap page appended to your website 
and be certain there is a link to that sitemap page on each of 
the other pages in your site. For database driven sites, this 
can be accomplished by changing the "footer" attribute on the 
template that creates the base-pages. There is an important 
thing to note here, especially for webmasters of 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. 

This article is not going to provide a lot of details around 
these elements as some or even much of what is written is subject 
to sudden change (this is a beta version after all), and the 
beta version simply hasn't been around long enough to express 
reliable ideas in writing yet. Once you have ensured that 
MSN(beta)'s spider can travel from one end of your site to 
another, and has a way into your site from an outside reference, 
take a look at the following elements of your site.

MSNBot seems to really like the techniques used by SEOs at 
StepForth. StepForth pays a lot of attention to keyword 
enrichment of the basic but critical elements of a site. 
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. 

MSNBot Guidelines, at a glance: 

- Incoming links from other websites with keyword-enriched 
  anchor text used to phrase the links.

- Easily read code that has been W3C validated. 

- As with all search engines, best results are found when you 
  only address one topic per page. 

- Keep your page site 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. 

There is a keyword density rule for MSNBot, however, we do not 
think that keyword density is the same for every business sector. 
For instance, the optimal keyword density for Maryland real 
estate will be different than the optimal keyword density 
California real estate, even though sites found under those 
keywords will represent the same business sector. 

Any common sense rule that applies to SPAM on other search 
engines applies at MSN(beta) as well. 

The MSN(beta) search engine is slated for full release any 
time now but, as with other Microsoft products, that doesn't 
necessarily mean we're going to see it anytime soon. The engine 
has been very stable over the past two weeks and is providing 
very strong and consistent results. Any bugs that remain to be 
worked out are well hidden and do not seem to be effecting the 
search function in any discernible way. When MSN does release 
their search engine as a full-version at MSN.Com, they will have 
a good tool that presents a credible alternative and serious 
challenge to Google and Yahoo. The long days of mono-culture 
search are over.

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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing 
expert based in Victoria BC. Jim works with a limited group of 
clients and provides consultancy services to StepForth Search 
Engine Placement (http://www.stepforth.com). He has worked as an 
SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his 
experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. 
Hedger can be reached at jim.hedger@gmail.com
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