Firstly you should stop exchanging links right now. Never exchange links especially 50 per week. I would even delete my links page to get rid of them all. Its all about percentages. If your site has 10,000 links then having 100 spammy (unnatural) links won't hurt you. If you only have 150 links then 100 spammy links will hurt you.
What are spammy links? My links are legit. exchanges with largely pr4 sites or better. Thanks Donald.
Link exchanges are unnatural links designed with the sole intention of artificially manipulating the search engines rankings. That makes them spammy.
Hi again, I'm still not sure about the link exchanges being the problem as then other sites I've exchanged links withs would be in trouble as well, but they are not from what I can tell . I've now found my main page has been dropped by Google, but other pages have been kept. On closer looking at my web site, I found that when setting up a new subdomain recently, a)) the new sub domains index page, although with completely different content, I inadvertantly left the meta tags of the domain index page on them B)) AND I haven't finished moving the folder to it's own subdomain, so the subdomain index page was very similiar to the index page in the folder it was based on. C)) I have no idea how I stuffed like that, but it was a pretty good stuff! I've now corrected that problem. Also logged into the google web masters tools, there is no sign of my site being banned and my other pages are still showing in the google results. Likewise, MSN hasn't banned my site, but isn't displaying my index page and a few others - normally I'd have the index page show up with the topic relevant page below it. It is, as my handle describes, bewildering. Any other ideas or anyone else want to jump in? Thanks Donald.
Firestorm, if any consolation, Kraft got dropped and is now showing up again. May be you will too. Also, check your sites in case you did what I did in the process of expanding. Also, be careful about the way you advertise your site, I got really upset when someone went out and bought a 1000 links, his site has since been dropped by all search engines except MSN - go figure that one. On another note, mad4 was good in directing me to my links, I've so far found that about 75% either stopped linking to me or used an underhand, form handling routine to hide their link pages. So many outbound links with so little extra coming in on my site could have started alarm bells in search engines. Maybe Mad4 right. Removing all the bad link partners now. Thanks Donald.
It's easy to get someone kicked out of msn. All you have to do is get a bunch of links to them indexed like so.. http://www.somesite.com/?homepage=001 http://www.somesite.com/?homepage=002 http://www.somesite.com/?homepage=003 http://www.somesite.com/?homepage=004 http://www.somesite.com/?homepage=005 a couple hundred will do... to msn, the sites look the same, hence BAN
What your describing sounds like your the victim of a blackhat SEO tactic that I read about a few weeks back. Theirs a certain method that allows people to mess around with msn results in a manner that would let you remove your competition - I'm not going to say how to do this because it's completely unethical. The resolution is to do the following: make an htacces file and have it send a Response Code of 200 - your 404 page should do this as well - basically make it seem that all pages on your domain are alive. By doing this I think it should help your problem - I'm trying not to divulge too much info -because I would hate to see this sort of thing in the wrong hands. If you google it, you'll find more information on it - I believe a few big SEO blogs discussed this tactic and one even detailed how to do it. I've probably said too much - and peaked a lot of ppls interest.
Hi theres a bug with the new MSN Live and lots of flaws have been found in MSN’s new ranking algorithm, making it very easy for someone to remove your competitors from MSN Live. (see the article below) http://www.seo-rant.com/msn-live-bug-you-can-remove-your-competition-from-the-msn-index/ regards ps - let me know how you get on.
Hi, Could you explain this code 200 and how to write in .htacces and 404 file? Matter of interest, Google is now reporting one of my pages as a 404, even though it is there and working fine - GOOGLe got the file name wrong by ending it with "..." when I checked just now. First time ever it's done that. Is that the result of this blackhat thing you are talking about? Thanks Donald.
If its only one page thats wrong then its not an attack on your site. Sounds like somebody just got a link to your site wrong somewhere.