MSN Admits Blacklisting for Certain Link Exchanges

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4021

 

Um, I am the source for this! ;-)

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006742.html

Loren sometimes covers my stuff.

 

Bitter-sweet. In the long run it's going to give better results to searchers, but that's not always in line with our SEO perogatives is it. I noticed something was going on with MSN fairly recently when this one person who seemed to rank top or near top for everything suddenly his empire crumbled and he's nowhere to be seen now. It'll be interesting to see how things shape up for next year with regards to MSN and how easy it is to rank, and stay ranked etc.

Good post.

 

I received this message from msn:

from July 24th. The site is just now slowly getting some rankings back, very slowly. You may be interested in this thread which covers this topic and on page 3 msndude himself chimes in:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=79415

 

Is this an SEO being referred to - because the two best known companies are still on Page one for the term Search Engine Optimization and they certainly have varied Back Links from a wide range of sites


The only other possibility is that MSN is banning sites that use their own Reciprocal Link Directories; they are manually banned after being 'OUTED' by a quality control staff who search SERPs for popular terms or review postings on forums or blogs.

If this is a completely ALGO based banning, there will be many false positives.

Do a search on MSN for the terms Reciprocal Links or Link Exchanges

 

Yep, this site was using Linksmanager with a directory of reciprocal links along with co-op. My guess is that this raised a flag and then it was manually banned.

 

I get more traffic from MSN than Yahoo and Google lol. They are decent.

 

Brian, the thread you reffered to was a great read. I am in some agreement with MSN and other SEs as many results are junk. I would like to see a little more blacklisting would help turn all of our attention to creating better site content. Blackhat SEO would be less profitable.

However, KJ does make some good points, and the argument against censorship is definately something to think about.

 

A few of mine got banned that were in my sig. Other sites that were not in my sig remained untouched.

I spoke to MSNdude on this forum. He did not even know what a 301 redirect was!

People must be having a laugh when the say MSN can challenge Google.

 

This policy by MSN is only for the English version - do a search on the LIVE spanish language version and it looks like the MSN of Old.

Anyone who has been banned, do you see your old results here.

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=
.

Linksmanager has an interesting reaction to this on their blog.


.

 

That looks like the normal LIVE results, I'm not seeing the Spanish one.

 

yea and msn has different critiera in serps

 

Does this new policy mean the end of mass link buying for MSN ranking?

 

Nobody at MSN knows what a 301 redirect is. If they want to make a better search engine they need to hire some SEO's.

 

MSN are stupid as usual, this is the wrong way to go and will ban a lot of good legitimate web sites.

 

i am a victim of MSN