Something happening to UK Searches in MSN
MSN UK - Change in Algo?
It would appear, that last night, MSN UK have changed the way that a site qualifies for placement in the UK search of the UK engine. (to be fair, it could have happened in the past couple of days, as I can’t remember when I last had to check MSN UK searches)
It used to be the case that they treated a .com and a .co.uk equally, but it now appears that the algorythm has changed to favour .co.uk sites, hosted in the UK, then .co.uk sites hosted outside the UK and then .com sites hosted in the UK.
UK .com sites have kept their positions in the web side of the MSN UK searches, but from what I can see, .com extensions are being severely downgraded in the UK searches, even if they are hosted in the UK.
I can’t see that MSN can possibly gain anything out of this, as their UK market share is tiny compared to Google in the UK already. If they are now excluding genuine, quality sites that are hosted in the UK, but don’t have a.co.uk extension, the results that the UK search will render, will be sub-standard compared to the web search and certainly compared to either Yahoo or Google.
It may be a blip, of course, but it has happened accross the board, so it looks as though some genius at MSN has come up with another winner!
