Links in MSN

[Mel]

hi all:

I have noticed that in the past couple of months MSN seems to have drastically changed their links counting algo.

For instance I know that I have at least 70 links to one of my sites from sites indexed in MSN but MSN link search results in 0. I note that other sites I am familiar with are also listed as having no links in MSN, but they have literally thousands of links on other search engines.

Has anyone else noted this or have an explaination for it?

[JuniorHarris]

I probably have more questions then answers, as I have not researched MSN in detail. Mel curious what syntax you are using? I'm also curious if MSN uses their own links to determine link popularity or another source? I was searching by domain name the other day on MSN and it provided a link to the most popular links for the site. The link MSN provided went directly to DirectHit. Could it be possible that MSN is pulling popularity from DirectHit? I'm not sure why it would offer a most popular from directHit, if MSN tracked/counted links on their own.

Also wanted to add, that when searching by domain name the results listed many entries which we do not have in LookSmart or Inktomi...so it appears that MSN has included some links from an additional source. However, I have been unable at this time to determine exactly how these additional links were added to the repository. Is there another source for MSN (which I have forgotten) other then LookSmart and Inktomi? I specifically see the listings when using the following url (where DomainName is the Name of the domain):

http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&MT=DomainName.com&UDo=DomainName.com

[Mel]

Hi JH;

As example. My original site was ecommercehosts.com. Over time I have added other sites in subdomains such as search-engine-optimization.ecommercehosts.com. There are now 5 active domains set up this way, all on their own theme, IP and even in most cases on different class c addresses.

OK now I go to MSN and search for ecommercehosts.com - no problem it returns six sites (one is a shipping site hosted on my server) all of these sites are over forty pages and all have multiple links to all the internal pages and to the other sites.

Now I go to Advanced search and search for links to this URL http://ecommercehosts.com. This returns three links, none in MSN, and it does not return any links or sites listed above in MSN.

Next, I go to advanced search, and search for links to the URL http://search-engineoptimization.ecommercehosts.com

This returns:
Results 1-15 of about 233 containing 'http://search-engine-optimization.ecommercehosts.com'

But none of these links have any connection to my site, and if they are linking to me I cannot find the links. None of the sites that I do know are linking to me are listed.

This gives me great concern because it seems that I have a number of sites I never heard of linking to me, but sites that are linking to me are not shown.

Well maybe its the funny way I have set up my site. So lets go to a known good site like say JK bowmans site spider-food.net. This returns only 16 sites linking to him none of which are remotely connected to his site (things like links from russia, sophmore girls school personal pages, a satanic page etc).

No I happen to know that sipder-food has hundreds if not thousands of links when I check other engines.

I am confused at best.

I am at best confused.

[JuniorHarris]

LOL!~ Well it sounds as if MSN has a problem calculating inbound links!~ I'm not sure of any other explanation...especially given your well-known example.

:confused: