I used to own MSN, what happened?

I had great success with getting pages into MSN search. Some pages are still #1 but others have fallen beyond the first few pages of search. HTML is pretty clean and light on the pages, content is updated regularily, but rank and traffic for some key pages dropped off in the last few days from dozens to zero.

Is this typical?

 

MSN Must be improving I don't say that to dis your sites, simply put, as MSN improves it will be harder to blatantly manipulate their SERPs.

 

In this case there was no effort to manipulate, I just made the code lightweight, include some basic SEO stuff, had fresh content, cross linked in my site, etc. I had no thoughts about MSN until they went from 5% of my search traffic to 50%. I always thought that if I got up there that easily, I could be surpassed by others easily but not disappearing all of a sudden.

 

It happened to me that my site disappeared from msn results for a few days, but not the entire site just the index page the other pages continued to show on serps(lower on the results though).

Maybe your pages will come again in a few days too. The other thing that you can do is to try to increase your links to your site to improve your position.

 

One of the biggest jokes or things said that made salesmen snicker, were another salesmen saying they "owned" a client. That has come back to bite many in the a$$!

Nobody own's nuttin. They earn it.

 

If you have done all your on-page SEO, then the only thing left is links. Do you have lots of backlinks?

 

On the site and pages in question there are internal links a few links from outside. Gotta get the co-op back in there. I took it out a few weeks ago because it was throwing too many errors.

 

durrhhh - nuff said?

 

Little Tip: MSN likes the anchor text of your internal links.

 

your focus should be more on what your competitors are doing...not what you are doing.

 

Gazelle,

I do have my page coded to create links from keywords to related pages. Were you refering to <a href=""> or <a name=""> (link from or link to)?

Thanks.

 

If you recently dropped the co-op ads from pointing to that site, then that'll be the reason why you dropped on MSN. MSN seems to like co-op ads, or rather the co-op produces good results with MSN.

 

I just put the coop back in last night, I had removed it as it was throwing errors like partial code for gif files rather than proper text ads. If the coop is as good as it seemed then I should see results back up in a few days.

 

hmmm.... I don't know about a few days.... weeks ok, but days is expecting a lot.

 

MSN also likes your forum signature links. MSN changes results very regularly, so I just look at traffic from them as a gift when it comes. Definitely start working on your backlinks and your MSN ranking will come back.

 

I am talking about the text that is imbetween the <a href="">Anchor Text</a>. Like that.

 

I have that in my sites. I was well aware of this after I read about the term "waffle" being linked to johnkerry.com last year. Somebody put many of these links in their blog and it became the number one Google search result for the term "waffle". Funny and good to use for non-humorous reasons.

 

I think it is something that happened recently with MSN, they dropped some of my cached pages and backlinks over the past few weeks and I dropped back about 9 positions.

 

Keep your content updated regularly.

 

Not trying to be snide, but have you actually reviewed what MSN says they like and want from sites?
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm