Any artificial way to boost a site position is potentially a black hat method. I don't see how adding a single line of code actually makes the page more relevant to the end user and justify a higher placement in the result pages? Nevertheless I won't mind trying this on non-commercial sites. There are many more out there, proven, that are kept secret by SEO professionals
This sounds intriguing, I am going to try it on a site I have had problems getting indexed. Thanks for the tip!
I'm trying this method on a site that's not indexed yet by MSN, will report with results. BTW: Tsk'ler leet.
I'm waiting to see the results, it's been up for a few days. I hope this works well. Great tip, I hope it isn't TOO black-hat...
does it have to be on the same domain that it's looking for, eg: does the domain that you put the link on have to be the same domain you use in the link? Also if this works, it would only work if your site is already known by MSN - if msn banned you, they won't be crawling your page meaning they won't be visiting your site or seeing whether you have it or not. And if MSN doesn't know your site, it's not going to magically find your site with this link. I don't think this will really do anything, it's just a regular link to msn search (unless they're directly giving bonuses for people linking to them). The only part that mystifies me is the &Form=QBRE (what is that for - seems pointless)..or maybe it has a purpose..?
In the long run, I do think that it can hurt. Basically, you are linking to a list of your own pages on Live.com. In that way, you are getting Live.com to link to you, or at least that's how the crawler sees it. It sees a link on your page to Live.com and follows it. Now on Live.com it sees 10 links back to you. So, you are getting 10 links from Live.com. Rather impressive.... It's an old trick. I ran tests on that very tactic about 3 years ago. Each time, I saw a brief improvement followed by being sent into oblivion after about 3 months. My test was with G, Y!, and MSN search. I'm not sure how live.com will react though since it is relatively new. /*tom*/