What has happened to MSN?

It’s been an exciting week for people in the industry of Search Engine Optimisation. You may remember me talking last week of the Google Dance and the effect on the number of back links and page rank a site has. Well, it looks like I was right in my prediction of a page rank of 5 for the Just Search Website. Our back links figure in Google also grew from a respectable 304 links to a whopping 1540.

With the update of page rank and number of back links, it looks like Google has also changed its search algorithm i.e. the calculations it uses to determine the importance of a webpage. For example, type into your browser: www.msn.com and then look at its page rank. Now surely that can’t be right you’re asking, well it is. MSN’s worldwide site has a Page rank of 2 as opposed to its previous score of 7. Now, I’ve heard from the SEO grapevine that sites which have white text on a white background i.e. hidden text or sites that share the same content as other sites will now be penalised in this new algorithm change, but surely MSN doesn’t employ these techniques. If you look at the content for the UK site and compare it to the worldwide site, you will see that the content is completely different.

Well it’s all a bit bemusing, but obviously MSN are doing something that Google doesn’t particularly favour. I doubt the page rank drop is due to the competition factor, but you never know. I’ll leave you all to make up your own minds.

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