I don't think so. I got site dropped to nowhere, which is not using COOP. However, I do have maybe 200 links pointing to it from link-vault, but I doubt that is it either. Another site I work on which had a huge drop is neither in COOP not in LV. Also the SERPs don't make sense at all, I have some inner pages ranking for weird terms better than the homepage. It's been about a week now since things got messed up, but it seems like it's still not over yet.
I don't think MSN is stable enough to say that serp ranking is due to backlinks or not. It's definitely some sort of "test" algo because the serps sometimes resemble that of google while most of the time it's just rubbish. My best bet is that they have not yet implemented the full algo (and perhaps having some technical difficulties too because i've never seen an update take that long)
Earlier to rank in MSN, I just used to point some COOP weight at it, but, I think now its not that easy for newer websites, plus, websites indulging in heavy simple reciprocal linking may have been dropped. I recommend --> Getting quality links from directories. --> Get links from articles' submissions. --> Getting links from content pages of relevant sites.
I believe the drop is due to the irrelvancy of the co-op or link vault links that are on the site. The site I am working with that dropped was the one with the co-op links on it.
I've seen most of my keywords that were dropped early in the week start to re-appear in the past two days. Hoping that trend continues. -Chris
I am not as fortunate. I have be comparing two sites. One that dropped and one that didn't. The difference is the one that dropped is showing co-op network links. Most of those links are nowhere near being related to the content of the site. I have just removed them and I will be watching to see what happens.
I have LV links on my site. There are unfortunately a number of irrelevant links from LV. Still, my dropped keywords appear to be coming back. This might just be a hiccup more than anything. -Chris
Good lord Netaddict ! Themed IBL's ? It'll never work ! I think you may have nailed it actually. The primary difference I'm seeing between minor moves and major-off-the-radar moves have been exactly that. The sites (for me at least) that lost out were the ones that had far greater focus on internal links, external unthemed deep-linking etc.. vs those that had themed IBL's as a primary focus. The irony of it tho.. it took a while to spot because not all themed IBL's are from sites that rank particularly well for the given keyphrase. I had a couple that faired quite well and had me puzzled, they didn't have any themed IBL's from what I could tell.. until I manually started poking, and realized that purely through coincidence they actually did (coop thing - just luck). Of course, with the time it's taking, I'd say it's become a little more work than they expected - the question is, will they roll back, or start into the next fun stage.. (where all the directories start appearing along with a world of spam).. More work either way.. Pooh MSN !!! Shame on you !!! Themed IBL ratios.. what a novel idea.. hey I know.. lets call it.. ThemeRank ! PS: I'm wondering also if age of a site has bearing.. (ie age of document/page on which the IBL appears).. methinx it's all taking too bloody long MSN ! Cheers, JL
Directories showing up gets my vote... They want to be like Google... and succeeding. Check this thread, it reminds me of the 302 bug big time. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=30504
i've just disappeared completely from the ranking pages and was on page #1 till yesterday....hope it's temporary as msn was the main source of my traffic....
Well the process is still ongoing, the results are just to wacky right now. Either they broke something, or they are in the middle of a big change.
My vote is big change and I think it's just about over.... for now. I have seen things start to settle down. One of the changes that I have noticed is site-wide links do not count for as much as they used too. Anyone else notice any changes?
One of my sites FINALLY got visited and cached again (previous cache date was September 23rd) Now it is cached on October 1st and I see just now I am back in the top 10, after having been out of the rankings for over a week. Weird thing though, is if I search www.domainname.com it is still showing the page cached on the 23rd. But if I do a keyword search a different page is listed, the one from the 1st. edit: One thing I noticed too is I have another site that is basically a coming soon page, that had a single link from another site of mine and was ranking in the top 20-25 for a set of keywords basically since I threw it up. As of today it has dropped out. That is encouraging to see as the site should not have been ranking. Edit Edit: I just checked and another one of my sites where I had a lot of pages ranked before got a thorough spidering by MSN in the last few hours, so will be interesting to see if it shows back up in the rankings soon.