This post is continuation of my previous article about Statcounter. Since then, I have started analyzing my traffic seriously to get the pattern of my visitors as well as to know them better. After almost 1 week, I’m still wondering why not even single traffic came from MSN (Window Live Search) which make me thinking why no traffic came from there. Does nobody using MSN Live anymore? Does their search result irrelevant, and their MSN Live itself is obsolete?

As you and I know, MSN Live or Live Search is successor to MSN Search engine back to 2006. But it seems the whole process of transformation is not providing the much needed impact to them and user as a general.

From my initial digging on several blogs and forums, I found that back link is playing an important role to rank better in MSN. However having certain keyword ranked high in MSN doesn’t promise decent traffic to your website. 1 good thing that I’m pleased with Live Search is, its ability to index new website faster than Yahoo and Google.

Basic Comparison
I have done simple comparison in order to know why I’ve got no traffic from MSN Live. This simple comparison will include Google, Yahoo and Live Search

Using some keyword from my article directory name I get this result

Google : 15,500
Yahoo : 1,930
MSN Live : 509

Page indexed by search engine (site:www.yoursitename.com)
Google: 43,500
Yahoo : 1,660 (searching using this term will get you redirected to your siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)
MSN Live : 45 results

From 45 results indexed by MSN, half of it is about the blog, which is under it’s subdirectory.

Windows Live Help
To know more about Live Search, the first place that I browse to is their own Windows Live help page. One of interesting point that I found here is this sentence

• “Submitting your site doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed, but it does help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it. MSNBot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-pages on your website. If you want MSNBot to index other pages on your website, submit URLs for those pages.”

I can’t really interpret what the sentence is really mean. Does it mean we can submit multiple URL from one website using their submission tool, or does it talking about sitemap file? To be safe, I have submitted only around 20 URL’s from my sub-pages using their submission tool

Submitting your sitemap
Sitemap is one of the important components that determine how fast and how many pages from your website will be indexed. As far as I know MSN Live doesn’t have webmaster tool such as Google’s Webmaster and Yahoo’s Siteexplorer where we can submit multiple sitemaps to them directly, but MSN does support auto-discovery sitemap through robots.txt which means their bot (called MSNBot) will crawl your sitemap automatically. But, it seems like even though I can found MSNBot on my log, the page it indexed is very less.

1 important information that I found from Wikipedia is, how to submit your sitemap to top 4 search engines including MSN Live.

Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Yahoo!
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Ask.com
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

MSN
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

To be indexed by Alexa
This is off topic. I have also found article from blogcritics.org about submitting your website to Alexa to be crawled by their bot. I have no idea if this will have impact to your Alexa ranking for old website or does it have same impact with placing Alexa widget on each your page, but why not just give it a try to see the result. Try it now

This is basically what I did to try to improve my MSN ranking. The methods above does not entirely correct or proven to improve MSN ranking, but it is parts of my experimental techniques so far