MSN Second Place Ranking for “Windows XP”!

March 1st, 2007

One of our regulars sent me an email just recently in which a fellow boasted about how easy it had been for him to be number two in the MSN search engine for what one would assume would be ‘highly competitive’ keyphrases including Windows XP, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer.

He mentioned that the traffic from MSN had been ‘unbelievable’ as a result, as you would assume it would be, but I think now that his ‘good fortune’ has been exposed, he might find that the sheer number of bloggers writing about it could push him out of second place pretty quickly

Nonetheless, his story triggered my interest a little, so I did a little background work and identified the site in question - Yahoo shows it only has around 630 backlinks, the site content isn’t particularly compelling and there isn’t any obvious search engine optimization strategies being employed.. a look using the www.alexa.com traffic tool (see below) and doesn’t show this site doing particularly well traffic wise, so I’m guessing one of two things:-

1. His top 2 position in MSN is only very recent, and therefore the spike in traffic he talks of hasn’t been incorporated in the Alexa graph yet.
2. No-one uses MSN

Both may in fact be true - but still, I’d love to work out how he’s achieved this - it raises the interesting possibility that MSN uses completely different metrics for determining what constitutes an ‘important site’ - I’ll be watching the situation over the coming weeks to see whether he retains his good ranking for long.

Cheers,

TheDuck

Entry Filed under: SEO Discussions