While the community interview questions to MSN were good, many have noticed that a lot of the responses were very "corporate-speak and didn't reveal much that the SEO community wasn't already aware of. However, a close look reveals a few nuggets of information that, in my opinion, made the effort (and the wait), worthwhile:
Rand: Is MSN interested in using lots of human input in perfecting the search results?
MSN: We are very confident in our computer systems, but there will always be a human element.
Rand: Does the MSN Search Engine measure, index and/or weight the meta keywords tag, Hx tags, alt tags in images or the “title” attribute in links?
MSN: Yes, we do use all of these tags with the exception of the meta keywords tag.
Rand: ...How does MSN perceive a 302-redirect link compared to a regular link?
MSN: We index 302 redirects by taking the destination content and indexing it with the source URL.
Rand: Is it possible to hurt a site’s rankings by pointing too many links to it too quickly or by pointing too many low quality links at it?
MSN: A good analogy here is you want to play in good neighborhoods. If you have a lot of spam sites point to your page then, well, your page starts to look like spam. On the other hand, if you are endorsed by many high quality sites then there is a good chance that your site is also high quality.
Rand: What would you consider to be the most important factor in determining the relevance of a website besides who links to that website?
MSN: The most important factor is ultimately users. Do your users rave about your content? Do they point to your content as a definitive source?
There's a few other pieces that make the full interview worth reading. Check it out if you have a few minutes. Please do leave feedback. My understanding is that the MSN Search team is planning to read your comments.
Exactly, earlpearl.
"If you have a lot of spam sites point to your page then, well, your page starts to look like spam."
So what happens if I point a ton of FFA or bad directories at my competitor? Can that damage be undone?
I'm confused on one area, which I don't think is unique to MSN. While the SE's warn webmasters to beware of "bad neighborhoods" what controls do webmasters have of spam sites picking up phraseology within the original site and linking into it.
It is an overwhelming task in its own right. What would be scary to the WH webmaster is being linked into by an unusually large # of spam sites, relative to "normal" links and being banned for that reason.
Is this a threat to WH sites?
It'd be nice if MSN is going to factor in the quality of the sites linking to us, that they would give us a spam factor indicator on their toolbar for web sites. There are plenty of web sites out there that are spam that I don't think are marked as so, and plenty that aren't that have somehow got marked as spam by an SE.