Who Uses MSN Search ?

[Marketing Guy]

Use the search command, ip: (followed by the IP address of the site you are checking). Check this page: http://search.msn.com/docs/help.aspx...hOperators.htm for more information.

There are loads of different ways you can research sites using basic search engine features. For example if you use the link: command on MSN, and find a lot of sites returned with the same or similar title tags in the results (which just takes a few minutes to check), then chances are there's some element of duplication there (in the same style as article or PR distribution), which can produce low quality links. Use your judgement on this - do these links count for a high % of total links? Then there is one factor that may contribute to lack of rankings.

Or a snippet of content searched on Yahoo or MSN may reveal duplicate content (and potentially www vs non www issues or additional domains using 302 redirects instead of 301...).

Hehe I have a bit of a reputation for sniffing out spam (or not spam, but reasons sites aren't indexed / ranking as they should) - it's my special skill!

[Webfu]

All right Marketing Guy - or should I say Inspector Spam ?

Anyways, I appreciate you taking the time to leave us the useful MSN tools. Very helpful of you...

[Marketing Guy]

I confess - I Googled for that link - I rarely use the IP thing myself. It's a kinda last resort to check a range of sites to see if they are all operated by the company.

You'd be surprised what you can learn about the SEO history of websites from 10 minutes on Google, MSN and Yahoo! (ok, ok and Ask! ).

[WhatcomsFinest]

I fully agree with the stats that older people and new to the internet types use MSN. I have noticed people like my Step Dad like MSN for the news content, stocks, etc on the home page. I also love how it is very easy to get on the first page with MSN. Looking forward to the increase in traffic with IE7 My homepage is yahoo but I have been contemplating changing it due to alot of problems whe I click on links there (doesn't do anything). Not sure why this is happening to me lately.

[Avinash]

I use MSN when I need to play some SEO games with it.

[Rankenstein]

Who uses MSN Search? According to my stats, about 5% of our search engine traffic. And that's with good MSN ranks.

[Webfu]

Agreed,,, its about 5% of the traffic from most of websites we have ranked well in MSN to. And once again like Jeremy says above - it seems like MSN is getting a lot of use from the older demographic of people.

[WhatcomsFinest]

Originally Posted by Webfu

Agreed,,, its about 5% of the traffic from most of websites we have ranked well in MSN to. And once again like Jeremy says above - it seems like MSN is getting a lot of use from the older demographic of people.

Yup so for some type of websites (mine included) MSN can be very helpful

[alterego85]

I never used MSN. None of my friends that I know of do too..

[Kasparoff]

Originally Posted by JamieJelly

I read on threadwatch that IE7 is an automatic update for IE6 users, and once updated, will reset the homepage to msn.

When it is fully released, I imagine those with high rankings in MSN should see some good traffic.

Yep. That's true. It's about time to bet on MSN in order to win a future battle. This IE7 feature concernes Google and they already brought a class action law suit against that "default" MSN option.

[Steve_gts]

I am in the UK and always use MSN if I am looking for a small or new companies website, MSN will often come up trumps where Google fails because of the sandbox on new sites.

[northbeach23]

I think older people uses MSN like saidev said.