Performance of MSNIndia.co.in in SEO

Do you know how much does it takes to take on the Giants in SEO. How much effort is required to push their content down and come up with your result.

Well honestly not much. Just a little bit of careful understanding of SEO, and careful planning will do the rest.

Dont believe it. See it for yourself.

I have already pushed MSN results down for the search queries like "MSN India", "msnindia","www.msnindia.com"," www.msn.co.in","msn.india","www.msn","www.msn india" and put my website www.msnindia.co.in on the second result of the first page.

This website is the least SEO compliant, having IFRAME in its body will be the least to get even in top 100. But now the results says different story as now.

Earlier I had thought this result will not be stable and will go down the first page soon. But now as of today I had maintained the result for the last one month and will try to stabilize the same for over 6 months at least.

Now whats my next challenge. Keep hooked up will be out soon.!!!!!!!!

Guess whats happened today on october 19, MSN talked with my service provider and they deactivated the whole account due to legal issue.
To which I have just one page polite statement about my intentions which was not to malign the MSN brand image but to prove my capabilities. I will and always have very very high regard for msn as a organisation.
But the ranking are still not dropping which was real tough.
Yesterday 11 January got legal arbitration notice for the domain and please note that after october 19 the page ranking has not dropped and is still there on second and third rank.

What will happen about legal notice. Keep Hooked up will be updating soon.

Lets Understand why this problem has come for Management Services Network (India) with MSN India.

Local and Obviuos Domains(LOD’s) for Global Brands

Google has different search engine urls for almost each country.For Example: for india the default search engine is www.google.co.in and for UK its www.google.co.uk.
more detailed list can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_domains

The country Top Level Domains started making more sense in search engines as well as for the users also. This is done to facilitate Geo Targeting of specific website to specific audience.

For e.g. for keyword pizza searched in google.co.in will give you India specific results whereas pizza searched in google.com will give you US specific result.
This started making search result much more relevant as I as a user in India would be intrested in searching for pizza outlets in India rather than US.

But with this update most of the Major Global Brands failed to estimate the power of country specific TLD’s. The user get educated and improvised day by day with the search results but the Global Brands still rely on the old methods.

Take a scenario where a global brand example.com provides the local version of lets say indian version of the website as www.in.example.com (subdomain with millions of pages).

Whereas someone else has booked the domain example.co.in separately with no relation to the brand.
Now till the time domain example.co.in is not in organic ranking it is good for the brand but the moment example.co.in started appearing in organic ranking and suppose it acquires second rank in first page, then there starts the problem for the brand.

Currently i.e. on 23rd jan 2012, I(akhil sharma ) and Microsoft are facing the same problem.
Consulting India Group and Management Services Network India was few of the concept that I floated was about to build a network around it in 2010 but things didnt worked out well and now they are just domains which I am planning to build upon later in my life.

But with the msnindia.co.in domain,a particular percentage of users have graduated to relate the local content on the MSN India with the obviuos domain www.msnindia.co.in rather than www.in.msn.com. So I started displaying the website in IFRAME which is not Search engine friendly with the disclaimer that the website is for informational purpose only with the content ownership of the MSN India.
This one page, least search engine friendly website started to rank in organic result for the keyword msn india and reached its maximum potential 2nd rank on first page.

However with the legal notice to my hosting provider on around October 17, I just displayed my intention that its a matter of performance rather than brand i.e. to compete with one page least search engine compliant website with millions of pages of MSN India.
Now the website is put under construction page as the case is still going on.

But this scenario is worth noticing that there are other possibilities which could be exploited by any one with malicious or personal use using the name of the brand.
For e.g. User already had associated the domain with the example.co.in as the local version of example.com brand. Anyone can setup email and can run information collection on example.com brand acting on behalf of the example.com brand.
If you hold the domain example.co.in then you hold the local market as well.
The possibility of misuse could be endless.

So its always advisable for global brands to consider three points in their digital strategy:
1) always on the lookout for the keyword association of their website with the local version. Once the keyword association acquires a certain threshold of users.
2) Book the domain before your user associates themselves with the local url version of your website rather than wasting money on legal proceedings. As this proactive approach is just a fraction of the cost asscoiated with the legal proceedings afterwards.
3) If possible display just like site map of content, a sitemap of websites officially associated with them and their local version for the user to become aware of and it becomes more easy also for the user to find different country directory in one place.