BillyS - 3:33 am on Jan 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

Okay, today marks the date that MSNDude has gone missing for exactly 43 days now [webmasterworld.com]. That seems like an awful long time for anyone to go missing. Originally, I thought he was on vacation. Then I suspected foul play (he was fired).

There are rumors that he was on a rotational assignment and he was promoted. Since no one’s saying anything, I’d like to speculate on what’s happened to him.

If you follow this forum, you’ll note that I whine quite a bit about MSN ignoring my website. In fact, this month, MSN accounts for exactly 0.5% of all my traffic. I noticed a couple of days ago that the MSNbot was spidering my site quite heavily, so here is my theory on MSNDude’s disappearance:

It’s pretty easy to identify some pretty significant problems with Live.com. My guess is that MSNDude will not reappear until we see a major shift in the MSN algorithm – which will happen very shortly.