MSN Screwing Themselves again?

In case you didn’t know, MSN have recently issued a new Patent about duplicate entries on one search page.  The first thing that springs to mind is that any page that’s listed in the organic with multiple entries, like www.domain.com Vs. www.domain.com/index.html, it would be perfectly fine for MSN to do this.  However as Bill posted at Search Engine Land is that it does not specify if this Patent is going to affect the organic side of things , the PPC side of things or scarily still, both.

Now what that could mean is that if you have a PPC ad with Adcenter and have a good organic listing in MSN, your organic could be thrown out of the window because you have a PPC ad.   So you can’t truely dominate the SERP’s if the latter does come true and will hurt advertisers and will screw over MSN in the long run I reckon.

Now, if the latter does come true, there’s a very obvious exploit already in this new Patent.  If Organic listings are getting banned (they may only get pushed down, you never know) when you have a PPC ad on the same SERP’s page, why not make ads for your competition!  Dunno about the rest of you but I’d quite happily pay pence to see a competitor say bye bye to there organic listing.