MSN and Clickthru's?

[ihelpyou]

There has been questions come up elsewhere on whether or not MSN tracks clickthru's and this is a basis for ranks for your Looksmart listings.

Answer is they may or may not BUT my experience has been absolutely not.

Optimize your site Before you submit to Looksmart. YES. You are optimizing for MSN. That is right. Do everything first. Meta tags, title tag, and CONTENT. Not only does MSN rank based on your Looksmart title and description, but also based on ALL of your html code.

Thought you should know.

[Hope]

From what you are saying, MSN spiders your site. What is the spider information? I have seen a few spiders that might be MSN's, but I am not positive.

[ihelpyou]

Hi Hope!.... not sure either. From what I can gather, they may take a quick snapshot of some kind of the page from the Looksmart listing. Not a full spider.

I also have good reason to believe that Looksmart gives a rating of some sort that is passed to MSN. Attached are keyword categories that the site could be ranked for.

I think this may have many things involved. This thing between Looksmart and MSN is quite the mystery. Notice that ranks can differ Greatly with Looksmart and MSN.

I submit pages to Looksmart all the time and have watched closely. Have also watched pages with bad ranks on MSN and then tweaked the code. Shortly thereafter, ranks have gone up.

[newriver]

Mr. I helpyou, you are going to make me use these forums only aren't you ;)

Thanks for bringing it over...I didn't think MSN tracked clickthroughs, but the one guy seemed so sure of himself.

Is there anyway once you are listed in MSN to increase the ranking? They are really the last frontier for us, we have got everybody else nailed down...even netscape as of 2 days ago.

P.S. Netscape now uses same search results as AOL

[ihelpyou]

Yes. Saw your question over there. ;) ....

One thing that seems to work is to try to get your keywords/content to the top of your html.

Not sure about this, but the couple of times I have tweaked like this seemed to help with ranks. I'm thinking MSN looks at the first half of the page and gives it importance.

The biggie though seems to be at the start of your Looksmart submission. I believe LS can push some buttons at the start depending on the quality of the site, ................................................................................................................ and who is submitting the page. :D

[ihelpyou]

I just read this at another place:

Your LS Title plays a key role in ranking well on MSN search, it really does.

Believe me, your title does not mean as much as we are all led to believe on MSN.

Much more important are your description and how well you are optimized.

Think about it; why would Looksmart or MSN put high relevance to the title when they know full well that the title should be your business name? The spammy names are the only ones that have keywords in them. Real company names normally do not have this. Example:
ihelpyou Services

How many keywords are in my name? :eek:

[Mel]

Positiontech say that they are now able to track clicks on Inktomi partners, but this is still in beta and apparently does not get all the clicks yet.

If positiontech can track Inktomi clicks can MSN be far behind?

[ihelpyou]

For Ink, no.

We were talking about the Looksmart listings in MSN. (web sites) as opposed to "web pages".