Not heard of Browserank? You’re not alone, despite regularly trawling blogs, news sites and being a part of a number of focus groups it was news to me until a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft have invested heavily in improving both the exposure and code behind it’s Pagerank rival . In fact many people are unaware that Microsoft (who have introduced Browserank) have been offering a small suite of webmaster tools for Live for quite some time.
Pagerank (Google) has been operating for quite some time. At one point it was the de-facto success marker for any website. It’s been diluted over the years and for most people I know, it’s now a “nice to have” rather than a requirement for a successful website or blog.
Apparently, Microsoft are now including “time on site” to decide the importance of pages listed in its index. There are some clear benefits to this, if a users spends a great deal of time on a site, it’s likely to contain good content which was relevant to the original search. The most obvious downside is that habitual sites like social networking sites and auctions (Facebook, Bebo, ebay) will no doubt be weighted more heavily despite the content being of little use. Does it completely negate Browserank though? We’ll probably have to wait and see.
So how does Microsoft know how long it’s search users have stayed on my site? Google can get this through it’s analytics application (which we use here) to accurately graph user statics. I don’t yet know how they plan on doing this (or even if that information is released yet), I’ll be having a delve through the paperwork later and see if I can find out.
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