MSN/Live updates their algorithm

Aaron Wall of “SEO Book” fame, has a great blog post about all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) updating their algorithms to a certain extent.

The biggest and quite significant change I’ve seen here in Australia is to MSN/Live. One of our clients has increased his visibility by 20 percent in one month!!! To put that in perspective, we usually see a much much smaller increase in visibility month on month for clients that we are optimizing for. As anyone in the industry will tell you, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. So to see such a massive jump in visibility in quite a competitive vertical was surprising to say the least. Aaron gives a very good analysis of the change on his blog, so I won’t repeat it here, but basically it seems that MSN/Live is now giving links and their respective anchor text a lot more weight than they used to.

What does all this mean? If you’ve spent the last couple of years optimizing for Google (seriously, who hasn’t?) you’ll more than likely start to see some good results on MSN/Live, probably without doing too much. Granted MSN/Live only has seven percent market share in Australia (Hitwise, August 2007) but if you’re in a competitive vertical there’s bound to be plenty of good quality traffic there.