Today someone from my work informed me about some rather strange MSN is doing.  When you go to MSN.co.uk (yes .co.uk, not .com) you will come to the MSN home page with all the usual ‘noise’ on it.  However you’ll notice straight away what’s in the search box.

I have never searched for this nor have I done any searches similar to this.  Could this be a new CPC style system? have the BBC paid a few £££s to make this happen? or does MSN think this is a useful search to the majority of the searchers?

MSN have updated there SERP’s page, again in the page of two days. They could of done this the same day to help conserve blogging energy! Anyway, MSN have updated two things today so that sames my blogging energy for tomorrow

The first thing you’ll notice now when you go to MSN is the new search box. Looks pretty much exactly the same however it’s got a cool little eye-catching mouseover glow to it. Here’s a screenshot of it in effectI thought it was pretty cool

I thought it was pretty cool anyway

The second thing which a few people may not of noticed is how MSN have got rid of those stupid > < buttons to go next/previous buttons and now have ‘next’ and ‘previous’ instead.

Good to see MSN improving the layout even if the SERPs themselves aren’t improving

Didn’t take Google to copy MSN on this one. Everytime you do a search on Google for whatever, right at the bottom of the page above the page links, it displays a related searches section now

Also to all UK residents, it only appears on Google.com at the moment, same as MSN. here’s a screenshot using the legendary search on cars:

MSN are implementing new changes onto there SERP’s, just like Google has been recently. However MSN have gone a bit further than changing colours round, they have recently implemented a new ‘Related Searches:’ section on www.msn.com top right when you do a search, any search, I haven’t found a search where they don’t return this.  Here’s a quick look at the new related search box when I did a search for ‘Cars’:

So is this because MSN may think people are interested in the results and may find them helpful, or is this MSN showing off there LSI skills, or even, both?

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.

I know you see quite a few SEO posts like this saying MSN’s improving, then next week it’s lookout Google here comes Ask! It’s going to be one hell of a struggle for Ask to make the top 3 search engines, for one they need there own PPC engine and not piggyback off of Google.  A-n-yway, I’m getting off topic now, back to topic - I use Yahoo practically everyday, doing searches, checking positions, link checks etc etc.  I have to say that the results were pretty good, even when compared with Googles, could Yahoo be the underdog in the game or are MSN going to piggyback the success?

But that isn’t the part that really impresses me with the new Yahoo, the thing that really impresses me is how Yahoo has stopped being what I like to call a Judge, and has now become a referee. Now these descriptions are probably not the best ways to describe them, but there the best I got and here’s the way I see them.

Judge Search Engine
A search engine that is a Judge does one of two things when penalising a site, one is GUILTY! where you get banned, the other is NOT GUILTY where you are not banned and that’s pretty much all Judge Search Engine can do.

Search Engine Ref
The Search Engine Referee can do more than two things, they can do infinate things punishing you as they see fit with unique penalties just for you if you’ve been naughty.  They can still RED CARD you where you get banned, but they also have the YELLOW CARD too so they can penalise your site and not just ban it such as the infamous -30 penalty.

Now the point I’m finally getting at is I feel Yahoo has upgraded to a Search Engine Ref from a Judge.  I have always thought of Yahoo, MSN, Ask and the rest as Search Engine Judge’s with simple banning procedures where Google has been a Ref for quite some time and have a number of ways to penalise you, and now Yahoo has stepped up to this pedastool.

Yahoo took quite a beating last year with a number of problems but they seem to be a lot cleverer so far this year

OMG! Google have a new function in Google Webmaster Tools which show you how many links you have pointing to your site,it was announced eariler over at the Google blog.  This is pretty big news, Google sharing what they know about your links, this will help show what Google thinks as a links and what it believes isn’t a link, at the moment the linking information is prett small as it’s a brand new feature and no data like this was stored (openly) at Google so it has some work to do before it’s effective.

As Matt Cutts has tried to hammer into our head, ‘Just because they appear does not mean the links hold value’ which is something most SEO’s should know from doing link:www.domain.com commands in search engines that show all (such as All The Web)

But from Matt’s line, does that mean he confirms that links currently displaying in the link:www.domain.com search in Google does show links that do hold weight? I think he does

Copeac have caused a bit of a storm over at the Affiliate Summit West with there T shirts.  There pretty outragous and I visit Webmaster World often and am usually at Digital Point but it still makes me want one

Hat tip to Shoemoney