This blog is a bit of an update on what has occurred with our Live Search results since I wrote a blog back last Autumn on the Live Search Recent Changes:

Pete also wrote this one on Live Search Webmaster Center - it is working now for me, although the information is light on detail. (Find some reviews of Live Search Webmaster Center here).

Regarding the results we have seen lately from Live Search here are some bits and pieces. 

Sites are still not listed in Live Search that were not before, so there is no improvement there. In the webmaster center they just show "Last crawled date 00/00/0000" which isn't very useful.

Our sites either showed a general rise or general fall initially, but since then it has been mixed the same as it was before, until the last couple of weeks when there has been a big update. UK sites first showed differences by making gains in MSN UK, followed by gains in the .com version and the regional versions (e.g France, Spain, Germany). I would say the results from the regional versions are much closer to each other than they were before.

Given the general overall changes seen throughout the depth of our clients' search terms, this is a major algorithm update. Here are some elements that I noted affecting rankings:

• Like Google, MSN Search is sensitive to the link text of the site, as much as the content itself - a search for "pub furniture" shows the top site as one that has no content, although the domain match is exact, as are many of the backlinks. 
• Index freshness-wise, searches for sites that I know have been inaccessible or down for months still brings back some results. They were strong sites with good backlinks, so there must be a historical element here plus the backlink profile still "rating" the site. (N.B. As a comparison Google no longer ranks the sites, but it was still ranking them for the best part of a year after their removal).
• Results themselves for relevancy are mixed - as I mentioned there are some results with out dated results, and also I found some where the top 3 results included PDF results, which is not what I would expect, and I wouldn't consider a "good" result.
• Title tags look to be important still; sites can rank on title tag alone with no linking support in non-competitive searches.

Tomorrow, I am going to give an overview of the communications and sources of information for MSN/Live Search.

Updated 14 Feb: You may also be interested in this new blog: If You Don't Rank in MSN/ Live Search How Much Traffic Are You Missing Out On?