MSN’s local search engine began a few weeks ago to include three local search ads, provided by Verizon’s SuperPages.com, for every search result. The ads are a mix of pay-per-click, pay-per-call, and fixed-rate pricing; all are sold by Verizon’s local sales teams.

Local results for SuperPages’ ads appear at the top of the results pages for MSN Local Search – which MSN launched last June. MSN Search (now known as Live Search at www.live.com) doesn’t provide local results automatically, but if you qualify a search with a location (such as pizza East Hanover NJ or pizza 07936) the local results will be shown at the very top, above the natural search engine results.

These listings come from SuperPages.com’s list of local advertisers for the given locale and are then selected by an MSN-developed algorithm. Pay-per-click and pay-per-call ads are selected first, and if there are not enough pay-per-performance ads available, the remaining units are populated with fixed-rate ads. Interestingly enough, some of these results appear to be for businesses without web sites. In those cases, there’s no web site link, but only an address and phone number.

In the past, Rank Magic has advised clients that SuperPages ads are usually overpriced for the value they bring, and we’ve advised against spending money there.

We are reconsidering that now for clients who can benefit from local search on MSN.

Sometimes when checking your rankings do you find that the description of your site is outdated or incorrect? You may wish to check the cached version of your page in order to see if the search engine has simply been using an older, cached version of your page. But what if they do have your current page cached?

Sometimes search engines prefer to use the description of your page or site as listed on a third party site like the Open Directory. But what if you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing? MSN may have a solution.

If the results of an MSN search don’t match the actual information on your page and they seem to be using the Open Directory listing for your page, MSN reports that you can use one of the following tags in the header area of your page to show that you prefer that they use your site’s information rather than the Open Directory’s listing when they next visit tyour page:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
or
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Currently this command only works for MSN. We can only hope that other search engines will follow MSN’s lead.

After conceding his company erred in failing to develop its own search engine [Duh!], Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer boasted Thursday of progress in fighting industry leaders Google and Yahoo. <Story by The Washington Post>

MSN has come up with a new plan to draw users away from Google: free stuff. The company launched a contest on Monday that will give users a chance to win prizes simply by using the service’s search engine. Over $1 million in prizes will be available during the months of February, March and April. <more>

Not to be outdone, Yahoo confirmed that it’s polling some Yahoo Mail users about what they would want in exchange for making Yahoo their primary search engine. <more>

Google pulled away from Yahoo in search engine usage during November in a major way, according to comScore Networks Inc. Google nabbed almost 40 percent of all searches in the U.S., a commanding lead of more than 10 percentage points over Yahoo, which took second place.

ITWorld.com reports these figures:

• Google 39.8%, up from 34.6%
• Yahoo down to 29.5% from 32%
• MSN dropped to 14.2% from 16%
• All three add up to 83.5% of all searches

There’s a lot of talk among SEO consultants about changes to the algorithm that MSN uses to rank pages. It seems that on-page factors are now more important. That’s good news for smaller sites with less than remarkable link popularity. Link popularity is still critical, but if your site is well optimized with on-page factors like keyword placement and keyword density, then you may rank higher on MSN than you did before.

Also, it seems that MSN Search prefers web pages that are listed higher in the web site directory structure. For example,  www.yoursite.com/widgets.htm is preferred over a web page that’s  deeper in the directory structure like  www.example.com/products/large/red/waterproof/widget.htm.

It also seems that MSN Search likes static pages better than dynamically generated web pages (pages generated on the fly by a database, such as is common in e-commerce sites).

None of this is really surprising, and our on-page optimization has always taken these factors into consideration. The rule of thumb, when you hear about algorithm changes is Don’t Panic. Ethical SEO like we do at Rank Magic will never cause your site to be hurt by these changes.