MSN Reinclusion Request

Michael: Actually we're very concerned about accidentally removing valid content in the attempt to combat spam. Ideally, the Search Engine should be able to give pages a correct ranking according to their usefulness to our customers -- regardless of any SEO -- and there should be no manual removal at all. Sadly, we're not there yet.

Any manual process has problems as well, of course. As a matter of policy, I won't comment on the specifics of someone's site in the public forum, but I agree that we need to find a way to give more specific guidance when we blacklist a site.

We appreciate your suggestions. There's some good food for thought here. The trick is to figure out how to provide some of the feedback you want in an automated way.

 

Hi Alan,
When did you send your email? I heard back from them in around 5-6 weeks.

 

MSNDUDE - are you for real an MSN guy - if yes then you should report this matter to the concerned dept instead of just giving ur 2 cents - get the work done - if u r the real MSN DUDE

 

This information is being posted with the consent of msndude. The Private Messages are below. The first PM is the last one received. The others are in the sequence they were received.

Originally Posted by krjewellers
Hi msndude,

This is good information, thank you.

The purpose of the thread was to inform other DP members what actions I took to have my website reincluded in MSN Search, and to update them on how my reinclusion request is progessing.

To that end, do you mind if I post your PM's and the reasons you believe my website was "blacklisted." I will post them verbatim to the ongoing thread, which is best in my opinion, instead of paraphasing. In addition, I will reply to your comments there so other DP members can benefit from your input. I started this thread to benefit other DP members based on my experience submitting a reinclusion request to MSN Search. Thank you in advance.

Regards,
krjewellers

Here is his reply:

Sure, if you want to. I sent it privately because I didn't want to embarrass you in public or anything like that. Also, I have a policy against discussing the issues of specific sites in public, but I'm fine with talking about the general policies.

To keep from embarrassing ME in public, I've corrected two typos in the text above.

msndude contacted me on July 26, 2006 via PM concerning this thread. At the time, his post count was zero on this forum. After reassuring me he was THE msndude, he asks if I would be willing to tell him the url of the website I was talking about in this thread, which I did. See PM’s below:

Originally Posted by msndude
I see your site, krjewellers.com, in our index with 54 results. I see it as at #2 result for the query "krjewellers" -- just behind the DigitalPoint thread.

Was your problem with another site?

Here is my reply:

Hi msndude,

Yeah it is another website. I did not mention the url so this was purely a general discussion concerning indexing. I did mention the industry later in the thread, finance, as also I believe that may be relatively important at this point.

Hope you got something out of the thread. It is still unfolding.

Regards
krjewellers

Then he sent this PM:

Originally Posted by msndude
I'll check it out for you, if you'll willing to share the URL with me. If you're not sure who I am, I'm the same "MSNDude" from WebmasterWorld.

Here is my reply:

Originally Posted by krjewellers
Hi msndude,

Sure. the url is *http://www.********.com/. Let me know what you come up with, or post your findings is the thread. Welcome to DP.
*removing the url is the only change I have made to any of my PM’s sent to msndude.

I received this reply:

Originally Posted by msndude
Wow.

I hate to tell you this, but there is no chance that we'll remove this from the blacklist.

Do you truly not understand why?

He does give me specific information in a follow-up PM. This is the “good information” I am referring to in the PM requesting his consent to post this information to this thread.

I sent him this reply:

Originally Posted by krjewellers
Hi msndude,

I truly do not know why, please tell me.

Sincerely,
krjewellers

Here is his reply:

First, the site has no original content; it does nothing but try to collect a commission by luring in the customers of real companies and then collecting a fee for forwarding them on. Second, it has tens of thousands of bogus inlinks. I looked at twenty at random and didn't see a single legitimate link. Finally, it lacks the polished appearance of a professional site, so customers are more likely to abandon it than they would a site that legitimately sells car insurance.

The upshot is that this is a site that attempts to fool the search engine into ranking it above the sites of actual businesses, and by showing this site, we give our customers an inferior search experience.

Sadly, there are many, many sites like this on the web, and we're only just beginning to make a dent in them. But over the last two months we've cut in half the number of sites like this that we show, and we hope to get that down to a small fraction.

If you think I'm missing the value your site adds, by all means point me to it, and if I agree, I'll apologize handsomely. But if you agree that the whole point was to siphon money away from big insurance companies at the expense of our customers, I urge you to put your talents to better use. Your krjewellers site looks quite nice, so you clearly can do good work too.

In Closing: I am posting this update on Day 91 of this thread. In my next update, I will respond to the above comments msndude has cited why my website has been blacklisted with MSN Search. However, I do not want to make this thread about my website or even the industry my website is conducted. I do not want to make this thread about SPAM either as that is too easy. That is not the purpose of this thread.

I would like to focus on the purpose of this thread that was stated in the first post: “I did some research and found a way to submit a reinclusion request (to MSN Search). I have started this thread to explain what I did, and to give updates on how the request is progressing.” I did this under the following impression, which is also found in my first post: “I believe the ability to submit a reinclusion request to MSN may become very valuable in the future.”

How is my reinclusion request progressing? Do you think my belief was right?

 

This is a fair account of our discussion, and, yes, I am the same MSN Dude who represents MSN Search in other forums. I'll be happy to help the moderator(s) verify that, if it's important to.

As we have recently stepped up our efforts to combat spam, we've been concerned about accidentally deleting quality sites, so we've been extra attentive to reports of that. Someone forwarded me a link to this thread last week, so I followed up on it, even though I hadn't posted here before. As a matter of policy, I don't comment on specific problems of an individual's site in a public forum, which is why I approached krjewelers privately. Given that they wanted to publish the discussion in the interest of a general disussion, I had no objection.

As it happens, most requests for reinclusion are eventually granted. It can take a couple of months, unfortunately, but generally they do get granted. (We're looking at what we can do to speed that up.) In most other cases, we identify what needs to be changed, and if that actually gets fixed, we reinclude the site. We're conscious of the fact that most sites (especially sites whose only sin is being in a link exchange) really do offer some value to some customers, and we don't want to throw that value away if we can help it.

However, to serve our customers, we can't ignore a low-value site that has managed to SEO its way above a high-value site, and if we can't fix that algorithmically, we have to resort to blacklisting -- at least until the site cleans up its act.

Unfortunately there are many sites that add no value at all; sad to say, you can still see them in many of our search engine results. When such a site brazenly asks for reinclusion, what are we supposed to say?

 

Aloha msndude,
First off... I thank you for your sincere reply to my post. Secondly, reading the additional commentary after my post earlier in the week has changed my opinion about MSN not making an effort to respond to legitimate inquiries about websites being delisted from MSN Search.

I understand that to be expediant, MSN must automate it's communications but I believe there are specific enough catagories even outlined in your thoughful post which can be automated so that at least a webmaster can get some idea on how to correct a situation and get back in the groove with MSN Search.

I'll perhaps try and send you a pm if I have more specifics to share.
Thanks again for sharing your insights and sharing with us...

 

Thanks, Michael. We agree that there's a lot more we can do here, and we're steadily working on it.

Lacking that, let me just repeat that the best way to anticipate our reaction to your site is to keep in mind that we evaluate everything from a perspective of "how will our customers feel about this result?" The more user-friendly and informative your site appears, the better off you'll be. Even if you get tagged as "possible spam," the human judge who reviews your site will give the benefit of the doubt to a site we'd be proud to show -- it's not worth wasting much time on a site that's so poor that no one is likely to use it even if it's NOT spam.

So ask yourself two questions: a) what value am I adding for my customer (who is also Microsoft's customer) and how can I increase that b) if I came to this site myself (never having seen it before), would I click anything but the back button?

 

Greetings msndude,
Thanks for your feedback. I happen to be both a Musician and an Artist so I do know what you mean about fine tuning intrinsic value in everything one does. I believe I have been successful in accomplishing this in my efforts as a webmaster and have received quite a few annonomous compliments as such.

Wondering if you received my PM regarding feedback on the specific website in question..? Hope so...

I look forward to your input,
Good fortunes,
Michael

 

In my first post, I stated I was going to face this head-on. As I am running a business, I need information to run it successfully. Below is my response to msndude’s evaluation. I have removed the real domain names to keep this a general discussion. In addition, I have removed real identifying information such as exact location and IP address to protect msndude’s personal information.

First, the site has no original content;

I tracked your actions from the time you clicked on the link I sent you directing you to my website:

You clicked on the link and went to my website, see below:

Number of Entries: 2
Entry Page Time: July 26th 2006 08:40:51 PM
Visit Length: 7 mins 59 secs
Browser MSIE 7.0
OS Windows XP
Resolution 1024x768
Returning Visits: 0
Location: Washington, City, United States
Hostname: xx-xx-xx-xxx.tukw.xxxxx.net (xx-xx-xx-xxx)
Entry Page: www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com/
Exit Page: www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com/index.html
Referring URL: forums.d***********.com/private.php?do=showpm&pmid=xxxxxxx

You looked at the first page of my website. You left this browser window open for 7 minutes and 59 second before clicking the first link in the left hand column. This accounts for the second page entry above: www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com/ was directed to www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com/index.html as first link act as a home or index button. You closed that browser without leaving the first or index page of the site. It was counted as two pageviews, but you only viewed one page of my website, the index page.

To state there is NO original content on my website is a bold statement considering you only looked at the first page of it. I stated earlier in this thread that the first eleven page of this website was the unique content and I added about 270 pages of articles to the site to expand the website for numerous reasons.

it does nothing but try to collect a commission by luring in the customers of real companies and then collecting a fee for forwarding them on.

These people are shopping for a reason. They either do not have insurance or are dissatisfied with the insurance they have. This website offers them up to five insurance quotes at no charge. If one of these quotes meets their criteria, and they buy the policy, I receive a commission. That is correct. The process is started on my website with the embedded quote form. I provide this service through an affiliate relationship with another company.

Second, it has tens of thousands of bogus inlinks.

Date: July 30, 2006
Source: http://www.iwebtool.com/link_popularity
Google 670
MSN 1,072
Yahoo 2,830
Altavista 2,720
Total Listings 7292

I looked at twenty at random and didn't see a single legitimate link.

I continued to track your IP address across my network of website. Next, you typed in MSN Search: linkdomain:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com -site:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com at 8:43:12 PM. This was 81 second after you went to my website initially. This had to be done in a second browser, as my website’s index page was still open in another browser on your computer at least until 8:48:50 PM before being left or closed.

Randomly you went to the second listed website from those returns:

Second listed website:
2006-07-26 20:43:12

xx-xx-xx-xxx.tukw.xxxxx.net
IP Address 70.58.81.151
Country United States [United States]
Browser IE 7
Operating System WinXP
Resolution 1024x768
Javascript Enabled
Date 26th July 2006
Time 20:43
Webpage http://www.st*******.com/
http://search.msn.com/results. linkdomain:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com -site:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com

This is a resource website that I owned and operated. It goes a fair amount of traffic and has a registered user base of about 500. My thinking when placing this link was that some of the users might need car insurance at some point.

Then you when to the third listed website from those returns:

IP Address xx-xx-xx-xxx
Country United States
Browser IE 7
Operating System WinXP
Resolution 1024x768
Javascript Enabled
Date Time Webpage
26th July 2006 20:43 http://www.su************.com/
http://search.msn.com/results. linkdomain:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com -site:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com

This is a Health related website. As the car insurance site also offers health insurance, I placed a link on this site.

Then you randomly went to the fourth listed website from those returns:

xx-xx-xx-xxx.tukw.xxxxx.net
IP Address xx-xx-xx-xxx
Country United States
Browser IE 7
Operating System WinXP
Resolution 1024x768
Javascript Enabled
Date Time Webpage
26th July 2006 20:43 http://www.p*****.com/
http://search.msn.com/results linkdomain:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com -site:http://www.*de-indexedwebsite*.com.

This is my personal Blog. I have blogged about insurance and referred my readers to this site as a good resource on one or two occasions. In addition, I placed a link to the site under links on this Blog. It receives good traffic on occasion. I talk about my projects and things that interest me there. MSN Reinclusion Request was a very popular topic. This Blog uses Wordpress and is hosted on my server under a domain name.

If you randomly went to the 2, 3, and 4 websites returned for your linkdomain search, it would make sense that you randomly went to the first website from those returned also. This forum currently has 10,820 members. My link appears in the partner section. When I worked out link placement with the owner, I thought some of his forum users might use car insurance and click on my text link.

Finally, it lacks the polished appearance of a professional site,

This is subjective and will vary from person to person

so customers are more likely to abandon it than they would a site that legitimately sells car insurance.

My conversion rate proves otherwise. I have tested different formats and content for the best results with this website. What I mean by best result is a completed insurance quote request. In my opinion, a website that does not convert lets down the users and the website owner. Both are just wasting time.

The upshot is that this is a site that attempts to fool the search engine into ranking it above the sites of actual businesses,

The company that my website is affiliated does not care that my website outranks theirs. When this website was de-indexed by MSN Search, I started a similar website using a PHP format. The embedded quote form did not work with this new format. I contacted the company and their affiliate manager had their programming department work out the problem with my new PHP format. They have been supportive throughout this whole thing. They were willing to code a special quote form for this new website if we were unable to get their current html code to work. By working with this company, I can offer the same resources available as any of this other ‘actual businesses”. The process is started on my website and transferred to their secure server to be completed. As I am collecting sensitive personal information, I feel this is the best way to handle this also. This process is setup to appear seamless by design, but it is not setup this way to fool search engines.

and by showing this site, we give our customers an inferior search experience.

Some people are looking for an independent company to get them unbiased insurance quotes.

Sadly, there are many, many sites like this on the web, and we're only just beginning to make a dent in them.

This is a generalization. If I were to look at only one page of a website, I might feel that way, too.

But over the last two months we've cut in half the number of sites like this that we show, and we hope to get that down to a small fraction.

If MSN Search is deleting websites based on looking at one page using subjective criteria, this may constitute an unfair trade practice. Whether I like it or not, the major search engines control a large portion of the traffic that travels over the internet. With this control comes some responsibility. If website owners are put out of business because someone from the search engine does not like the appearance of their website, or the fact it is based on an affiliate business relationship, or that it is a Small Business instead of a major corporation, this might be an area in need of regulation.


If you think I'm missing the value your site adds, by all means point me to it, and if I agree, I'll apologize handsomely.

I did not post this for an apology. I posted this as a follow-up to how MSN Search is handling my reinclusion request.

But if you agree that the whole point was to siphon money away from big insurance companies at the expense of our customers,

This was unnecessary.

I urge you to put your talents to better use. Your krjewellers site looks quite nice, so you clearly can do good work too

Thank you. It is setup using the exact same formula. Optimized text to educate and interest visitors, an affiliate relationship that is seamlessly integrated into the website, and choice – if what I am promoting does not meet your needs, here are other similar websites you can try – contextual ads.

In Conclusion: I have learned some valuable information from this experience. I am making changes based on the current internet environment. This experience has probably saved me a lot of potentially wasted time. This has been 93 days well spent.

Regards,
krjewellers

 

Wowers krjewellers,

I really am impressed by the amount of time you've taken to share your experience. I of course haven't visited your site so I can't comment in that regard but if your webmaster compositions are anything like the comprehensiveness of your posts, I'm sure it's high-quality work.

I have yet to hear back from the msndude in regards to my situation which only parellels yours from the standpoint of being downsized in my msn serp listings. I think I already mentioned that my website had some 2,000+ listings for nearly a two year period to a parenthetical blowout 44 overnight. I received only formletters when I wrote msn directly. They were courteous enough... just totally irrelevant to the situation I presented.

I was somewhat impressed that msndude seem to at least review and provide direct feedback to you on a confidential basis although after reading it here in the forum I'd have to admit there were some fairly harsh comments in the message to you.

I'm still going to be quite disappointed in msn search if I do not receive some rational feedback on why one of my sites was radically downsized for no apparent reason since the content core has been essentially the same during the past year. That is except for adding Google AdSense to my scripts... I hope to God that wouldn't have any influence on my msn listings but I couldn't swear to it either...

Interestingly enough my site seems to have made up for the loss in traffic I once received from msn, via Google and Yahoo. It took about a week for that to happen. Thought that was pretty amazing. Get punished by msn and subsequently rewarded by primarily Google...

I'll keep you posted if msndude pays me the courtesy of a response to my unique scenio I outlined for him... In the meanwhile thanks for your vigilance in sharing with us krjewellers...

Mahalo nui,
good fortune my friend,
Michael

 

Thanks for posting the info krjewellers and thanks for helping us out with comments msndude. Your replies to msndude make a lot of sense and I originally thought that msn was being a little ignorant in making such assumptions which you have proven, at least to me and probably others on this forum. Hopefully msn will learn to be more diligent and open-minded in their future analysis of the value of websites.

 

Actually, we stand by our analysis of the site. This will be our final word on the matter.

 

It is evident that search engines are moving towards censorship. I am in your same situation krjewellers. My site was removed from msn's index. It has quality content and it converted extremely well; however, search engines are modern internet dictators that have the final word. If visitors didn't find your site valuable, they would leave and would not convert. Why are search engines trying to dictate our sites? I can promise you that I know more about what my site's visitors want from my site than MSN. Like krjewellers, I take the time to research the needs of my visitors and implement them into my web site. It's a win-win situation. Why are search engines wanting our sites to become charities? I'm in it to make some money, but I won't make a dime if I don't offer people what they're looking for. With recent changes in the algorithm of major search engines, it really seems like they want our sites to become free internet encyclopedias.

 

I think if msn follows this approach indiscrimitely, they will remove a lot of the big players which people want to find making their results less relevant. This is due to the fact that there are a lot of top-quality sites that are highly ranked that are, or have been, engaged in link exchanges. The message I received about one of my sites was about my site being engaged in link exchages so I assume that this was the only factor considered in this case.

 

Interesting thread, has anyone been banned out of the msn search and then got relisted and back into top rankings again ?

 

If you look at what IS showing up in all major SE's nowadays, then you see wikkipedia and other free encylopedias and it seems that SE's just love these sites and I can't really understand it. Well, I can understand WHY they like them and that is they have a lot of "indexable" content but how can the SE's be so damn sure that this is what people are actually looking for and want to see? Why do they automatically think that people are just looking for information about somthing they search for? Maybe they want to BUY something? Do they then have to click on the SE's advertiser ads? Is this why? Results are just information and then SE's show ads so they make money? Are all other sites just "feeders" for the ads?
I think that SE's have too much power and are getting less and less accurate with their results. More and more crappy "content rich" web sites are popping up, but I guess, the ads are more relevant

 

After reading these stories, of banned sites because they have links, It is logic that people use Google to search information.

A good Search Engine must index more information possible, otherwise it isn't a good engine. Also, Itsn't normal to consider links as spam ... First of Search engines, there wer link directories, and the sites advertising themself linking between.

The term "Surfing the Web" borns from the fact that web sites are linked everyone to another and they create a surfable net. Also search engines uses the links on other sites to reach other sites, and it is simple absurd the policy of MSN.

If they don't have knowledge to index with a right rank a site, and they think the only way is to bann or unlist the site, they are simple losers, and they never acquire share in the market of search engines.

Also, link exchanging is done to have traffic, not to rise rank on search engines, and of course it is more valuable a link on a site that traffic from search engines like MSN.

I speak with experience, I have stat counter on my sites, and I can report from my stats that I receive 40% of traffic by Google, 40 % from links, 15 % from Yahoo, and only the other 5 % from MSN and other search engines.

Search engines must adapt to sites, not the sites to search engines! If they aren't able to fix their algorithms, it is better they do another business, or it is better they search new and more competent engineers and programmers.

Also it isn't difficult to calculate a rank, I think it was simple if the rank was calculated on the number of pages of a site has, and the average quantity of words per page. Large and quality sites, has hundreds of thousand pages, and if a rank is calculated considering the number of page that a site has, it is logic that small and low quality sites will have a low rank. Of course they also could penalize pages with high number of links, calculating a variable based on quantity of words and quantity of links. It is so simple and logic ...

 

My site got de-indexed. Found this thread when researching why.

MSNDude gave MSN's opinion of the problem site. A revelation.

Result: A barracking. I didn't read the self-justifying replies of forum members.

What was great was the subtext of his reply (my perception): we want quality, 1000's of substandard links won't help you any more, we dislike affiliate sites.

There's a real problem with spammy sites. Another problem with SEO'd, lightweight, me-too sites. Really, who needs them? Only their authors.

Webmasters should put themselves in the shoes of SE staff. You have a spam problem. What do you do?

Wield the knife. Brutally.

Clean up the first couple of SERPs, and Bill G. leaves you alone. Job done.The users won't notice much difference, webmaster whines notwithstanding. Plenty of sites chasing popular keywords out there.

 

There's more to it than that, actually. Some sites got de-indexed when they shouldn't have. MSN still has huge spam problems and now there is a bug that allows others to get your site banned from the SERPs so we have to question whether things are being done properly and fairly.

The site that I was referring to was not a spammy site or a "me-too site" and I think that this was the case with the thread starter as well. It was not so much a case of substandard links as it was about excessive reciprocal linking which has nothing to do with the quality of the site or it's content.

 

I've had a 'network' of my main money sites de-indexed by MSN & despite three emails they have not even had the decency to auto acknowledge receipt.
Strangely enough my hardest hit was a car insurance page. This page had serped well for over a year with MSN - in fact the kwd was the merchants name & I very often beat them in the MSN serp.
The problem is in the UK you cannot add content per se to a page advertising insurance (regulations) - subsequently the only content on the page was by merchant feed ie invisible to spiders & duplicated across every affiliate. The serps were a pure result of linking. In fact I made an error in my terminology when creating my on site navigation ( on site linking) & I shot to no.1 for that term (the merchants name - wrongly phrased).

Now I have to hold my hands up & say a lot of links where coming from DP and interlinking my own sites, I also used text manipulator programs to spew out hundreds of page variations to capture the low hanging kwds. So I have to conceed any 'spam' accusation. Though my linking stucture made it extremely difficult for a visitor to find another 'variations' - so the visitor was not subjected to one spammy page after another.

However, this 'network' of sites are all hosted on the same IP & virtually all my sites have been de-indexed some used DP in & out some did not. Some where interlinked heavily others not (possibly an odd relevant in content link here & there) some had 'variation' pages some did not. The only common points are the IP & the domian registrar. In fact one site is 100% WH - it only provides info eg TV schedules, Weather reports, Road traffic reports, Horoscopes, etc etc - no duplicate content (actually very little 'content' in truth) - the site was built for offline promotion so the pages are not even SEO'd or kwd'd. It doesnt even heavily promote affiliate products - just odd banners to pretty things up a little. The only links pointing at it were from my own sites. That site was de-indexed.

I mirrored the car insurance site on another IP & MSN has picked it up ok (tho I dont enjoy the serps) this had DP pointing in & other old linking strategies. So I put a new 'insurance' site on the original IP - different registrar, Whois protected, no linking from any old sources - I changed everything I could think of. Content is merely the reproduction of company PR's (which I dont expect to secure good serps) G (372 pages) & Y (370 pages) have both fully indexed the site - MSN has not even picked up a single page - not even the homepage.

FYI - I still have 2 sites fully indexed by MSN on this original IP ( not finance ) so its not a 'bad neighbourhood' thing. One is handwritten sex content targetting sex toy products - the other was thrown up very quickly by an ex employee & was never finished, every page is pushing an affiliate product. Incidently neither are registered in my company name.