I have confirmed with MSN Search staff (Janine Crumb) that my site Most Popular Sites was banned from MSN Search for having a link exchange forum area. Here is my email thread:
Well, at least you got a real response, and it seems timely. Hard to get something like that from the big G.
It just seems stupid, IMO, for MSN to ban a site for having a link exchange forum. I could find several thousand sites on MSN that have link exchange areas. I have to decide now whether to remove it. I honestly think I get more traffic from people visiting my link exchange forum area then MSN referrals to the whole site.
Yea, that is weird. Wonder why they singled yours out. Maybe you could ask since they were so responsive. Anyway, if you get more traffic the other way, definitely keep it.
So, it's forbidden to have an area where members can talk and exchange links? Something that years ago was a normal thing (exchanging links), is now forbidden? The face of the web is really changing... is this the new web 2.0 ?
I am really impressed that you even got a reply. Could you remove it then later add a new forum with a different name and function obviously
This doesn't sound like a forum problem to me. It sounds more like she thinks you are involved in some sort of link exchange scheme with an outside link exchange service. But I could be wrong.
Keep it open and just lock it down so MSN cant see it. As people join then they can see it but just close it off to the general public and bots. PGZ
For the life of me I can't figure out why your site was singled out...does this mean that MSN is on the hunt for any site that has even reciprical link pages....if so, there's going to be a whole lot of sites impacted. There's tons of sites with good ranking in MSN that are built solely on rec. link exchanges. I'd be curious if you sent an email off being more specific about your concern and see if they responded. Take Care All!
MSN's support team seems a lot friendlier than Google's. You should be happy that they responded to your email in a timely manner and let you back in their search results, IMO. So don't complain, or even think about doing so!
Nothing like good old fashion censhorship--telling you what you can and cant' do with your own website, business and life. This is why we need to work to keep an open marketplace where no one entity can become large enough to control the masses. Too bad it's already too late.
But robots.txt can't stop a human visit and a manual penalty. So, what kind was this? If it was automatic, Jackson_Hu suggestion works. If it was not, well, you can put the exchange forum in a different domain. Or even subdomain, if they are treated like separate sites (which is the case in several engines).
I don't know what kind it was, but they said if I remove the forum for link exchange I could be reincluded. I have this as an integrated component of my main site, so using the same software thats not possible, I could make a sub-domain and use vbulletin or phpbb i suppose. Go to their search engine blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/ and click CONTACT.
Fine with me if they do... For the first 19 days of 2006, traffic to this forum (organic search results) by search engine is as follows: Google: 141,607 (609 users users creating new accounts) AOL: 1,480 (11 users creating new accounts) Yahoo: 1,088 (8 users creating new accounts) MSN: 521 (2 users creating new accounts) MSN doesn't really bring any value at all (for me anyway).