MSN' with your head

Last week I was talking to my Father about the Hertz edition of the 2007 Shelby Cobra GT-500, a throwback to the Shelbys that were originally part of the Hertz rental fleet. (James Garner drives a Hertz Shelby Mustang in the 1966 film, “Grand Prix.”) Anyway, to show my Father one of these cars, we go to his computer and run a search for them. On MSN, I type in “hertz mustang,” and sure enough there are several pages that display photos and/or reviews of this soon-to-be available for-rent car. The funny thing is, not one of the pages that came up was part of Hertz’ own site. Nor was there any sign of Ford’s website, including the official Mustang product page. What was going on? How was it that a search on a major search engine, using two high profile company brands, cannot bring up those companies’ sites?

To show the difference in the “Big Three” of search, a similar search on Google for “hertz mustang” turns up two listings from www.hertz.com in the first 30 listings, and on Yahoo the Ford site shows up two times in that first 30, with one of those listings on the first page of results. Nothing, however, is to be found on MSN but Mustang blogs and fan pages. Many of these sites show up on the other two engines, of course, but it must be vexing for Hertz and Ford to not show up at all in a search for their own product. The reason is that MSN has drastically changed their search algorithm in the past few days. Search engines use specific variables to determine how relevant a page will be in a given search – such as the number of inbound links, the number of times a search phrase appears in the web page copy, etc. These variables define their search algorithm, the life blood of a search engine. They will always keep the specifics of what they are looking for secret to keep the unscrupulous from forcing their page to the top of a search query. It will be altered periodically in an attempt to improve results – though this does backfire on occasion, and make the results worse. This is where MSN is at the moment – returning tangentially related sites in a search, and ignoring brands and companies that may be directly relevant. This hurts MSN, of course, as much as it hurts the sites it is ignoring. If MSN continues to return results that are irrelevant, no one will trust them with a search, and Google will add to their already enormous base of users. So, in short, if you are not turning up on MSN as frequently or as prominently as you think you should in a relevant search, take heart: Either MSN will soon fix their problem and your rankings will improve, or they will devolve into complete irrelevancy themselves.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)