On the blogger site for Alexa I found today this interesting statement:
Google and MSN have been going back and forth for the #2 spot in the Alexa Rankings for the last 8 months or so. Google had been on track to displace MSN as the second most popular site on the Web (behind Yahoo) and has in fact done so briefly and repeatedly only to be beaten back by MSN. But now it is beginning to look like Google is fading. When you dig in and take a closer look at the Reach and Pageviews, you’ll see that Google’s Reach (number of users) consistently exceeds MSN’s but MSN’s Pageviews outstrip Google’s by a fair margin. Because Alexa’s rank is based on a combination of Reach and Pageviews, these two have been neck and neck in the rankings…
I think if MSN has more page views than Google the reason could be the quality of results…
I tried so often MSN for search but never got the results I need. Another reason why MSN has so many counts is that the Alexa tool bar is an Internet Explorer add-on and MSN is the default search in IE.
These numbers are different:
on my website there are more then 50% of the visitors are referred by Google and less then 1% by MSN.
These numbers are not special for the most of us…
One site that I have built for a client consistently has over 50% of traffic from MSN, and approximately 5% from Google, 25% from Yahoo. I’ve checked the referring URLs and my site is mostly relevant to all the MSN queries.
And how do I get in this blogotition?
Hello Jason,
That’s interesting; I know also websites getting more referrals from MSN than from Google. Mostly websites with non-english content in a market segment where it’s difficult to get high rankings in the SERP’s of Google.
I think this depends also on different website category and countries / languages. In my case I have top rankings for keyword phrases like “php upload” in Google and on MSN it’s difficult to find them…
About the blogotition:
First join the Webdigity forum and post at this thread that you want to join our race. It’s up to all (4) webmasters to accept a new contestants.
Just read this article:
Using Freshness to Optimize for MSN
According this article “fresh” websites will getting higher listings on MSN.
I did come checks for this “fresh” weblog, and it’s true: the search for “Custom error pages” gives a result within the top20 on MSN and nothing (not within the top100) on Google
Ok, then I hope that other users do the same search on MSN…
MSN has so much traffic, because all the newbies use it. Don’t forget that IE redirects you to MSN when you have an unreachable site.
I wonder if this is including visits to MSN.com and Microsoft.com as well.
@Michael,
Microsoft has it’s own rank at Alexa…
according Alexa is the no. 1 website Yahoo…
…and live.com has its own ranking, too.
MSN is way easier to rank on, that’s it, at least in the fields where my websites are targetted.
One thing is, for sure not a major factor, but consider that it’s mostly webmasters that use Alexa toolbar. Same people who often check backlinks to their sites. You can’t do that on Google, as that displays only insignificant portion of backlinks. So unless you have some automatic tool, you head to MSN search.
But again, that’s only a small contribution to the discussion, the above mentioned theories for sure contribute way more to the MSN traffic than this…