MSN Reinclusion Request

I was thinking the same thing. Actually, I'm only aware of Google stating that another site's actions can't adversely affect your site's rankings, but for MSN to come right out and state exactly that - amazing.

Also to krjewellers, just wanted to thank you again for detailing everything in this thread. It's been a positive learning experience for me, and hopefully has helped others, as well.

Sam

 

Yes, thanks a lot for posting the reply from msn. I'm still waiting on a reply from msn about one of my sites but I have a hunch what the problem might be.

Just to clarify, I don't think msn is saying that you can be penalized by having bad incoming links necessarily. In this case the site in question first had to link to those sites as these were reciprocal links where the link was removed on one end. Still, it seems stupid of msn since you can't control whether people decide to keep your link or remove it.

 

That's an important clarification, and a good point. I suppose that, from MSNs perspective, they see it as penalizing you for willfully linking to a site with low credibility. Whether this is fair or not is a matter of opinion, I suppose. But in my opinion, after a Webmaster has made a good-faith effort to break off contact with the offending site, it seems excessively punitive.

Sam

 

I don't know about MSN but I submitted to Google one of my main sites for removal :O

I got tired explaining the mistake, asking for reinclusion and using tricks to get it back.

The site disappeared as well as its pagerank 4... six months later the site is back to Google.

Perhaps you will have to wait for getting MSN back.

 

So could you explain the meaning of this:

 

I think perhaps I already explained it for him in my earlier post:

Sam

 

Now I got your point Sam. You stress on the fact that this site had a link exchange relation to those sites some time in the past.

Now the problem is that they confess "... it will inflate your ranking inappropriately" so what are they going to do with link buying? What I say is that if they are worry about "inappropriate ranking" they should include it in their algo rather than manually targetting websites. The current way causes confusion and unfair exclusion/high rank.

.

 

Hey Mahmood,

I agree with you 100% - including an algorithm adjustment would not only make things easier for publishers, but for MSN, as well. I guess the only thing we can bank on is competitive pressure, which is typically the only kind of pressure that will eliminate policies such as these.

Sam

 

How do we know that it isn't in their algorithm? It would seem harder to have someone scouring the internet for reciprocal linking rather than including an algorithm to check if site A links to site B and site B links to site A. I'm sure they at least have some sort of flag especially since krkjewellers said that the links were buried deep in his site.

It could be an issue of link exchanges with sites with low credibility or it could be relevancy or quantity/percentage of links from link exchanges. One of my sites that went supplemental was showing only the pages that have relevant reciprocal links in the index and was excluding all the other pages with link exchanges. When I did the site: command, I saw 2 pages: the homepage and a page with relevant reciprocal links and everything else was left out. After removing some spam, there are a couple more pages in the index.

 

Thank you very much this is very helpful, I will try to get them to reindex me as well... I've lost about 8000 indexed pages.

 

I don't think the issue being discussed was whether the algorithm detects reciprocal links with undesirable sites - I'd guess it probably does. The issue was why the algorithm doesn't automatically discount these links in its calculations for ranking, rather than deindexing the site entirely. This is based on the "inflate your ranking inappropriately" reason provided by MSN.

Sam

 

That wasn't what I was talking about either. I believe it was you who brought up the issue of reciprocal linking with undesirable sites being a factor. I was merely pointing out that they may not even be looking at the quality of the sites. They may be penalizing for the reciprocal linking itself or reciprocal linking involving the other factors that I mentioned previously. If the problem had to do with reciprocal linking with low quality sites then it probably wouldn't inflate his ranking because it would be a link from a low quality site.

The reason why they aren't just ignoring links that are part of reciprocal linking is probably because they want to penalize this behaviour because it is search engine spamming. Whether it is working correctly is questionable given the case brought up by the thread starter.

 

Hi Everyone,

I got this a few minutes ago concerning my June 4, 2006, e-mail to MSN Webspam:

To whom it may concern,

Thank you for the reply. Would you please give me a specific example of spam on my website. I have removed the links at the bottom of the page as requested. If you would please specify what your company considers spam on my website, I will be happy to look at making the changes as long as it does not take away from my visistor experience at my website. Presently, I cannot determine what in addition to what I have already done is needed. Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,
krjewellers

Their Reply received Monday, July 24, 2006 at 2:35 PM PDT:

Your site is part of a link exchange and has been excluded from our index as a result. Please contact us once you have removed all spam.

MSN Search

I moved on some time ago, but I want to keep you in the loop. I have been concentrating on replacing the income this website was making. Presently the website is rated #1 for a good term in the Blog Search Beta (Blogger) results based on its RSS Feed. I get them however I can .

Cheers,
krjewellers

 

I emailed on June 13th and got the exact same reply July 24th.

 

Ah, this thread has proved to be really informative. I like to thank all for sharing their experiences and useful information.

It would be nice if it gets added to the library!

 

There is a distinction between what clues software might use to flag a site as "spam" vs. what a human judge might look at in order to investigate that result. When you ask a human being to consider your site for reinclusion, obviously that person will look at the incoming links.

 

So, are you saying that msn may penalize a site based on external factors that are out of their control? We talked about the case of reciprocal links but if a competitor wanted to get a site banned, can they create some spammy backlinks for you? I sure hope not because if that's part of the procedure, you are going to see it happen more and more.

 

It takes more than a few spammy backlinks to get a site blacklisted. That should be obvious from our current SERPs.

But if your site is under suspicion already for other reasons, your spammy backlinks will definitely count against you.

If you think your competitor is a spammer, just send e-mail to and let us know; that's much easier and cheaper. If your competitor is NOT already a spammer, trying to create a bunch of spammy inlinks to fool us into thinking they're spamming almost certainly won't work.

 

I have had a site taken out of the msn index. I have sent e mails of to this address without reply.

 

Greetings krjewellers,

In my opinion this whole episode is a sad commentary for both webmasters trying to suppliment an honest living and the public who has now as a result of this episode, been prevented from having access to another source of service and/or information. MSN shot your site down without warning... you ask why did you shoot me... they say we don't like something you did... you say what did I do so I can get you to like me again... they said we don't like something you did... try and guess what it is... I don't believe anyone would tolerate this non-sensicle banter in any other kind of relationship. I haven't seen Google do this without at least a competent explaination of what was wrong and how to correct it. Don't know about Yahoo in this regard but my opinion is if MSN doesn't incorporate a little more intelligence in their algos and how they communicate with the folks who create content for the web, they're current small piece of the Search engine pie will slip into an even smaller piece of the Search engine pie... quite sad really...