My site's topic is most often found (on search engines) via two obvious search words. Anyone with the same topic would know this. I haven't been successful at getting a top 10-20 ranking on Google or Yahoo for those words. But with basically no effort I've achieved a 4th place ranking on MSN. I notice this for the best possible reason--traffic to my site has increased and it's easy to see where it's coming from.

In the past, most of my traffic has been driven by the fact that Yahoo had indexed the "deep content". I have a content rich site and when someone is looking for something more specific than the two most obvious search words--Yahoo gives me a pretty fair shake.

Interestingly the sites ranked ahead of me on Yahoo and Google are generally not nearly as content rich as my site. On MSN, the sites ahead of me are commercial and easily more content rich than my sites.

I have a second site that is not so focused (who knows what the top two or three search words should be?). MSN and Yahoo seem better at indexing the content that's deep (not shown on the front page). Since there's no real theme--this is the main way this site gets traffic (aside from loyalty). Google knows I'm there but doesn't rank me nearly as high for the same searches as Yahoo or MSN. MSN generally ranks me highest.

So,
MSN gives my "home" page and my site in general a better shake and gives me a good ranking for the most typical search words. In general MSN ranks me highest.

Yahoo indexes the old news and specific topics better and generates traffic from more specific searches but still doesn't feature me for the most common search words.

And Google can find me but just generally doesn't rank me as well--not nearly as well actually, for any search that doesn't include my domain name.

Not really looking for help--just providing the info and wondering if there is a XOOPS pattern or explanation here.

I am increasingly puzzled by the wims of Search engines and your accounts here make things worse to understand.

Pre XOOPS my old html site was overrun by the likes of MSN, altavista, alltheweb, hotbot, BBCi, and of course google.

Now only google with a few yahoos and hot bot. We're talking virtually the same content, just transferred to a XOOPS site.

Google cant get enough of may pages and servers dozens on the first page. So what's happened to the rest?

I had the same experience with MSN, atleast in the short term.
msnbot and yahoo slurp, hit my site on a daily basis.
The other day I noticed in my logs, refering urls coming from msn.
I was ranked 7th using the typical generic search term that was used, atleast for a day or so.
Now if google would just show up to my site, I'd be happy.