Not doing well with MSN and HotBot Link Popularity

[FB-Guy]

This seems odd to me. I am using a really nice tool to check link popularity:

http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

Which show that I am doing much better with Yahoo! and Google than I am with MSN and HotBot. Looking at other sites, this is the opposite of what is typical.

Any ideas why? Are there differences in how they index that I should be accounting for?

FB

[jlknauff]

It's probably a fairly new site so they may not have picked up your links yet. SEO is something that takes a lot of skill (which needs to be updated continuously) and a lot of patience.

[Alan Murray]

Do not worry about that - MSN and Hotbot all have much lower link counts for all my sites.

[rizla]

MSN is shifting back and forth to Beta, referring more and more browsers,
might be a reason.

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/08/349199.aspx

Generally - these SE may be sllower in act, Try to check if the sites that link to you are indexed.

[FB-Guy]

That makes sense. Is there anything specific we should be doing for the new MSN search technology?

[rizla]

Mainly the "regulars" - proper on-site optimization (IMHO got more importance on MSN than G) + focused link building with pages that already show on serps.

[TechEvangelist]

Here's alink to the MSN beta Guidelines page

http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

[FB-Guy]

TechEvangelist,
Thanks. This was helpful and interesting. I was very low on MSN, becuase they were indexing our site with beta.search.nsm , and we are now popping very well there. We have more inbound links there than any other engine. Good experiment.

Does HotBot matter? I am guessing they were based on Inktomi, who is now Yahoo. Any tips for HotBot? Do they matter?

FB

[sem4u]

Very little traffic comes from HotBot but they have been coming up in some of Google's SERPs quite recently.