MSN reducing links

[William Martin]

I've seen some drastic reductions in the amount of links MSN is showing to my sites. I'm not really bothered, cos MSN is a waste of space when it comes to driving traffic, however, these are some of the drastic changes I've seen:

Site 1:
24/5/06 - 1106
29/5/06 - 1070
1/6/06 - 1063
6/6/06 - 1087
10/6/06 - 1171
20/6/06 - 110

Site 2:
24/5/06 - 207
29/5/06 - 294
1/6/06 - 284
6/6/06 - 317
10/6/06 - 341
20/6/06 - 28

Source = MarketLeap

Anyone know what's going on? As I said, it will have no impact on traffic cos I never get any from them anyway, it's just the principal of the matter.

They are getting strict about MFAs. I had few thousands of links coming from few MFAs, (not mine, I just happened to be in top 10 for a keyword, which they screen scrapped from google results to all pages!). Now they are all gone and my total backlinks also reduced considerably.

other than that, i didnt see any change!

I love MSN btw, good for new websites till getting out of google sandbox!

It could also be that, they report the number of pages in total sometimes, instead of the number of links. In that case, your actual links could be 10*results shown by marketleaps. Their automated acript fails to understand the difference. You may actually try it directly rather than using the stupid tools!

[tvelasquez]

Just a few days ago I had about 4900+ links now I have 149, however, I'm still on the first page for my main keyword.

[chriscm]

yeah I had about 2500+ and now im like 150 :/

[JWilson]

This doesn't sound good for new sites such as mine. What do you think? Will this be better or worse for new sites?

[Web Gazelle]

I noticed links have been dropping but you had a pretty drastic drop. I bet they have changed what they consider an inbound link. Perhaps they no longer count every link when looking at site wide links.