Wonder if it's got anything to do with their new crawler [blogs.msdn.com].

If looks like I am back better than before I wonder if it was a test of the new crawler algo and they took a look see and reverted it back or the new crawler seems to like the sites I do now better than before. :)

thanks for that update on the new crawler

The serps that microsoft is putting out really do look much much better than I have ever seen them.

I'm seeing google notebook spam pages at the very top results. If this is the result of an update it looks like a blooming awful one.

It looks to me that there are 2 data centers the serps and they are rotating in and out. One data center is presenting much better serps the other may be a way microsoft is working on the bot and is throwing the spammy one.

I don't optimize for LIVE since it's more prudent to optimize for the search engine that sends you the most traffic.

I also don't usually check the serps, I let analytics tell me if I'm improving or falling behind.

That being said I'm seeing something new after taking a look just now and I don't like it.

example.com
example.net
example.info
example.com.pk <---- india ranks 4th in the US because of keyword in uri?

having the uri be the keyword is getting MORE important but keyword + a couple of letters doesn't seem to get the same boost.

We've seen awful SERPs results in MSN Live in the last few weeks (some sites completely dropping out of the index :/ ), and even some of the pagination has been terribly broken using the SE. I hope the fix it soon.

same old same old with MSN. We stopped caring about this engine about 3yrs ago. Not worth even looking at the serps given the traffic levels from it (even when top 5).

Not worth even looking at the serps - Here, here total waste of time.

marketingmagic when I went through the 950 filter then the 60 then the 30 for a year I was delighted with the MSN traffic still am. Traffic is what makes us work. What will happen if MSN does buy Yahoo do you feel they will keep their algo. I don't thinks so then your looking at 35% of the market. Do you not think with MSN being the default search loaded in Dell this will impact the search %.

I just feel I want my site to be in the top pages of MSN just to be there as one day you may go poof in Google then what you will be glad MSN is sending ya the traffic(as small as it may be) it just may keep you from going under.

As I said there looks to be 2 different serps being displayed one is real doggy the other is in my opinion much better than I have seen before in a bunch of secors I have looked in. It is as close to Googles results as I have ever seen.

The doggy one is displaying all the examples I have seen from the above post.

I agree that I pay little attention to the 'lil engine that could. First time I've actually been in good positions in awhile, but too many site subdomains listed high along with their root.

I agree that I pay little attention to the 'lil engine that could.

More like the big engine that couldn't. It seems most of the traffic I get from MSN are those spammy bots using fake referrers. I really wished I was more diversified and had tangible traffic from MSN, but it the world of search engines, it's just Google and Yahoo! for me. One of my site went from say (just an example) 100 pages to 1000 pages in the course of 1 year, yet still have the same 20 odd visits a day by MSN after all this time.

I'm seeing something very similar to @JS_Harris - incl. lot's of unrelated ccTLD stuff floating into the Australian indexes.

example.com.pk <---- india ranks 4th in the US because of keyword in uri?

.com.pk is Pakistan and not India. India is .in and .co.in etc.

I stand corrected, the site however is all about India.

A Pakistani site promoting Indian based content ranking 4th in the US when the ONLY thing it has related to my topic is it's domain name.

That's even worse!

I'm all for diversification, but with MSN sending so little traffic in comparison to Google, and even Yahoo, we certainly aren't about to optimize for MSN and risk losing rankings in the engines that actually send us traffic. So until MSN does something to make themselves relevant this is the way it'll stay.

Apparently MS are serving SERPs from different data cnetres on COMPLETELY different Algos. It's been nurfed for about a week. :/

In my niche I see different rankings every day, but it seems to me that they are improving.

I'm seeing more msn banner ads across major sites and i think the area they need to focus on is an attractive compensation plan for all publishers ... and i expect them to be a contender yet, though it seems to come together slowly