Balle - 9:31 am on Dec 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Welcome to the club....

I know my site has been banned from MSN for having to many links pointing to it.

I do old fashioned reciprocal link exchanges with related sites of interest to my users. The site also have 2 side wide link exchanges with friends sites - boath sites are on the same topic.

My site is very popular so it also has many one way links from all kind of sites - most of them re-publich my news articles and in return some give a link back.

As far as I know I don't use any dirty SEO tricks - I love this site too much and have spend too much time and money building it to just flush it down the draine. But apparently that has happened anyway in MSN.

No link spam or black hat SEO has ever been used (to the best of my knowlage). Obviously I have never said no thanks to a link when I get the oppertunity - but I have never done any forum or blog spam or stuff like that.

I have purchased a couple of text links to get trafic and obviously to help rankings too but nothing major like some of my competitors. I have also submittet to every single directory I have been able to fine.

Now only searching for the URL brings up the site in MSN search - it used to rank well for it's main keywords. It does rank reasonably well in Yahoo and Google.

I have written MSN with no success. MSNDude did reply a long time ago and he confirmed that the problem was the link exchanges - I have tried to fix it but I guess MSNDude has received too many sticky mails to be able to reply.

I can not remove all the link exchanges since they are of value to my visitors and obviously they help Google and Yahoo to index the site.

So here we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Looking at the search results for the terms where my site used to rank - banning my site has defenitly not helped on improving the search engine result pages. The results are 95% junk now.