Yep, in from the cold. About 2 years ago my main site and any links on MSN disappeared. As of yesterday's Google PR update I am now receiving hits via MSN! AND.... pretty high in the SERPS for several keywords too!
WOW 2 years! Did you email MSN at all? Do you know why you were dropped in the first place? I was dropped on Oct 3 (this month) although I never got many hits from them, I do hope this Google PR update puts me back on there index too. EDIT: My PR did not change.. still PR0 Did yours go up, down or stay the same? Cheers James
I emailed MSN at least half a dozen times - no response at all. No idea why they dropped me. PR remains at 5. Good luck, but as you say, not much traffic comes from there so no big worry.
It is frustrating - I never got many hits from msn/live - but maybe around 3rd as well, my site disappeared from their index and I have emailed them about it. I have had a reply but nothing useful or answering the question (they were on about submitting the site manually and there was an issue with their site accepting the anti-spam code). That was not my issue at all - it was why I used to be in the index, the msn/live bot is on my site every day and no pages from my site show in the index (and I included some sites of pure spam that did exist and were fully indexed and ranking well on live search as an example of the poor results that were being returned, while my site wasn't even getting indexed etc). It is frustrating to not know why your site is being excluded but also see so much less relevant spam sites appearing. The only thing I can think of is that I done a couple of reciprocal links between my blogs and my main site. Although there is no other way to get any relevant links due to every other webmaster in the same area not linking to any competitor (or not returning any msgs). - should I just look to get 1000s of irrelevant links?
No. look for relevant links - but 'not so relevant' links don't do any harm, like signature under your posts etc - the engines still count them. But I can say that if I had any links that MSN didn't like 2 years ago - why have I suddenly been included again, as I still have those same links as 2 years ago when they didn't like them By the way, a third of your traffic is quite a lot - you'll miss that. Only about 5% of mine is via MSN.
Its a no go on relevant links - all the top sites (really is only 5 sites considered relevant), do not link to other similar sites. The majority of other sites are either spam sites, link farms or self-serving links (network of sites owned by the same people). Then there are numerous blogs (blogspot/wordpress etc) that may be 'relevant' but really that is where I think my 'problems' might have came from since checking links it was my blogspot links I linked to etc.
I aggree.. At least you got a reply I got a automated response saying: We are currently experiencing a backlog and are working on responding to re-inclusion requests as quickly as we can. I did the same thing in my email.. I turned up a lot of spam in my searches but not the site I expected..(my site) I know how you feel.. But I don't think that MSN would drop anyone for having reciprocal links.. if they did they would wipe out a hell of a lot of websites.. So who did you Email? I emailed webspam (at) microsoft dot com and put as the subject: reinclude
it wasn't webspam I emailed, it was some email through contacting the live search team - as I said the initial problem was their manual verification wasn't working. Though I had to include the search term used, the expected result etc. Simply site:mysite.com showed nothing indexed. I queried why I used to be indexed, was dropped, started to get indexed again, dropped again (3 pages appeared, then disappeared). This was the latest reply I received and have not sent any further correspondence since. The latest reply could be relevant to me or could be generic (due to many others likely contacting about sites missing from the index etc.
Ok.. When I was searching, trying to find why I had been dropped, I found a page on MSN (I can't remember where) about sites being dropped for various reasons...and a statement about "if you think you were un-indexed by mistake and would like to be re-included" then it had a link to the webspam email, and said to put reinclude in the subject line... It sounds like they are trying to fix it for you.. I never got a response from them (apart from the automated one) but I did noticed this morning that I got one hit from live last night! the keyword used was "www.mysite.com" Now when I search site:www.mysite.com I do get my main page show up.. but no others... so maybe I will be re-indexed soon, (hopefully.) Cheers James
I just checked mine as well - back to 3 pages indexed again... so it does look like their technical problems may have involved some automated trigger for spam (might be they view links from certain sites as 'spam links' - ie blogspot since many spammers do abuse that). Though there would be a definitive list that live search would use, they may have been playing with their spam trigger and found that many more webmasters were affected than they first thought would be.