I apologize right now for the amount of rants over the last few days. We just have some really smart operators running around the Internet and somehow, someway my path just keeps crossing with them. Pay close attention though, I am going to teach you a couple of things to get past the MSN Inactive Keyword crap they seem to pull on me every other day on one of my campaigns.

So my ad rep, she loves me. She gets a call from me at least every 3 days for the last month. I have explained my background, that I am smart enough to optimize a landing page for the almighty Google’s relevancy formula and get a low minimum CPC but I for the life of me cannot understand why MSN makes keywords inactive for me. Furthermore, every time they get reactivated they have only last no longer than a week before they are inactive and I have to call her again. God bless heart, she will surely have someone else being my Rep or she might do something drastic to herself. Who knows, I do know that this woman can take a verbal beating. Yes, I know we should not talk down on women and I assure you that I don’t but I damn sure make it a point that the company she works with are COMPLETE BAFFOONS!

So here goes the conversation the other day. I am well aware that they have a different bot crawling pages for each country. The MSN bot is a sensitive little prick. If you want a misspelling as a keyword in your campaign, you damn well better have it on your page.

Ok now she tells me that my keywords on my US campaign are inactive because the Canadian MSN bot crawled the page and that the page I had optimized for the French-Canadian market was crawled by the US bot.

Silence……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Allow me at this time to show you my silent reaction:

I couldn’t even speak. After about 2 minutes she asked if I was still there. I politely and calmly said “yes, still here”……then I added this –>”Are you”?

She said yes of course and continued to speak as if what she had just said had no ill effect on me whatsoever. I said “WAIT”, allowed me to back us up for a second. She said “OK”.

I said “you mean to tell me that a Canadian MSN bot crawled my US page and a US bot crawled my French-Canadian page. She said yes that is correct. I had it, so I said “What the f#ck are you people doing over there”, “does this make any f#cking sense to you whatsoever”?

She said she could understand my frustration and that she would activate my keywords. I said don’t bother, they will just get inactive in a few days and you and I will have to have one of these healthy talks. It’s almost like talking to a Pay Per Click Psychiatrist. Yet, one who didn’t go to school and study what they were doing. She said I have to understand that she is only a specialist. HAHA, your a specialist? You specialize in screwing over advertisers that are trying to spend thousands a month with you?

All that aside she told me that they are indeed facing a variety of vast issues at the moment. I said NAY, you been facing issues before you even got started. I don’t care how long it takes you to fix this, I care about you being my Rep and keeping my shit active. If I have to wire you some damn extra funds to keep you up a few hours more each night, I am happy to do it, just run my damn ads. Anyway, nothing is getting solved right away over there. Things have ran pretty smoothly the last couple of days though.

Bigger Issues…

Plain and simply MSN tells me that my landing page is not relevant. It’s not relevant for every single keyword I have in my ad group. So what do I do then? I call up the young lady and ask her what the f#ck her suggestion is and I shit you not, this is the reply I got…

It is  acceptable to add keywords to our pages, in the body of the page, in the same color as the page background! This supposedly helps their bots decide if the page is relevant to your keywords or not, just by the fact that the keywords in your campaign are present on your landing page.

 I tried telling her that keyword stuffing pages is considered a bad thing to the other search engines. She said she realized this but that it is perfectly fine with MSN. As a matter of fact, they encourage it. Put 300 keywords in your meta, a hidden DIV or even have them in the background as the same color so that they are hidden.

I find it so hard to believe that they are this far behind. I said ok, what happens when you guys (and girls) pull your heads out of your asses and finally figure out that people are placing advertisements that are NOT relevant just because they know they can game your bot?

The answer she replied with was…”We will deal with that when the time comes”.

Well, the time is now. I setup a second account with a family members name and information and I am now running tests to see if I can get away with this. If I can, there are seriously thousands if not millions to be made here if these yin-yangs can’t even get their bot to index and optimize properly.

For now though, I have been building a page for Google and Yahoo, and then one separate for MSN. Now some people may argue with me on this and say like “Does MSN even send that much traffic”? My simple reply is that if they didn’t, do you think I would make seperate landing pages just for their dumbass bot? There is serious money to be made with MSN, I know because when my damn ads actually get a chance to run, I get to see it. Keeping them alive is the problem. More to come as soon as I get more concrete information and testing done.

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