In recent posts I've mentioned how MSN's new Live Search is gaining a greater share of total web searches ... apparently causing the recent loss of Yahoo's market share.  This recent surge of growth prompted me to again look for their "webmaster guidelines" and this morning I found success at this rather long link.

Although titled as "guidelines" they are presented as technical and content "recommendations" along with some practices to avoid.  A very very brief summary follows, please refer to the above link for details.

MSN Tech recommendations (summary):

• only well-formed HTML code
• no broken links
• allow MSNBot to crawl your site/control with robots.txt
• Keep URLs simple and static. (THIS IS THE BIG ONE!!!)

MSN Content guidelines (summary):

• design pages around valuable content
• include keywords in visible text
• Limit to a reasonable size - under 150kb (w/o images)
• One topic per page
• each page accessible by at least one static text link (ANOTHER BIG ONE!!!)
• Add a site map
• Keep site hierarchy fairly flat (ANOTHER BIG ONE!!!)

MSN Discouraged Practices (summary):

• Irrelevant words - attempting to increase keyword density
• Stuffing ALT tags
• Using hidden text or links
• Artificially increasing the number of links - link farms

It is a good idea to keep these items in mind when working on your sites.  I've always expected Bill Gates to step up and become a force to contend with in search engine services.  Looks like that may be happening now.