One of my biggest rants with MSN Search has been their weighting for physical location of webserver. It is totally incredible and beyond any reasonable measures.
Before you read any further, it is important you know some background information. My company, KK Mediat is from Finland. However, because of various issues our website is hosted in Norway. No big deal in modern days you might think. That’s what I thought in year 2000 when starting my current business, but oh, how wrong I was…
The table below pretty much sums up the situation:
| Keyword | MSN.com | MSN.fi | MSN.no |
| Hakukoneoptimointi (finnish for seo) | #27 | #45 | #1 |
| hakukonemarkkinointi (finnish for sem) | #13 | #35 | #1 |
| Keyword tool | #205 | n/a | #16 |
Prosessional SEOs do know that getting good positions in MSN requires hosting in target country (and preferrably also national ltd), but the rest of website owners and business choose hosting location with other criterias like price of hosting or location of business units. This behaviour has huge impact on quality of results in national level MSN searches. Europe alone has nearly 40-50 countries, globally we are speaking of nearly 200 countries… And in every country there are thousands, most likely tens of thousands of small, medium and large business that lack visibility in MSN Search because of this behaviour.
If MSN wants to beat Google, this is something they need to fix. So If you happen to know/meet any MSN Search developers, give them a hint 😉
