MSN Live Search Oddities
We have been doing some promotion of a recently re-launched web hosting site and part of this is building traffic through the search engines.
Looking at our detailed access logs, we can see that we are getting a small amount of traffic each day for the single keyword “hosting” from MSN search (live.com). Now, this would be a bit like the holy grail to be ranked on page 1 of MSN and Google for the keyword hosting. But according to our stats, that is exactly what is happening on MSN.
So, we have been running the query on MSN ourselves to see if the site is listed, but it never comes up on the first page (or even on the next few pages for the single keyword “hosting”).
So, our stats say one thing, but we can’t see any evidence of it ourselves… odd. Presumably the stats package wouldn’t make it up, so presumably its happening.
It seem that maybe Live search is somehow rotating the results it show for keywords during the day - we all know that search engine rankings may go up as well as down (so don’t secure your house on them ;-)) but we’ve never heard of the results cycling repeatedly during the day.
We’ll keep an eye on it, but it may be a new development, or of course it may be just a quirk.
Now, when we get on page 1 of Google.com for “hosting”…. 