Drastically lower visitors from MSN since end of May. Wonder why?

[hulahoop]

Hi,

I have much less visitors, now about under 10 from MSN since end of May. Previously it was 70 + a day.

What are MSN's criterias. I have a lot of the same word on my site because it is use in different context when combine with other words. I don't know if MSN thinks that is stuffing for that particular word?

Anyone experienced the same or have any advice on how to boost it up?

Thanks

[msndude]

Does your site rank in the same position for your keywords? Did the contextual description for your site change? Do you have a strong new competitor?

Other than that, it's hard to say why our customers might not be visiting your site.

[hulahoop]

We use to rank pretty high for most of the targeted keywords on MSN (just like in Google and Yahoo). Only MSN has kinda dropped us. Nothing else has changed much drastically.

Competitor wise, all seems the same.

Don't know what it could be.
Although I had an incident where our site was hacked through SQL injection. THat's fixed but it doesn't seem better.

What do you think it could be?

[katheesue]

I believe that part of the problem is due to MSN deciding that categorization of sites into a standard set of categories based on what people actually look for constitutes spam.

A navigation menu which contains categories such as:

red widgets
white widgets
blue widgets
green widgets
happy widgets
sad widgets
large widgets
small widgets

widget resources
widget sites
widget books
becoming a widget classifier

and so forth is being treated as spam by MSN and sites which have such catogories are being manually removed from the index.

[xspace]

I have a same problem with my sites.

My MSN traffic drop from about 2500/day to 400/day from May.25 . I'm lossing money each day when msn played with its algo.

I do not understood why index page for my each domain dropped from TOP positions to nowhere, but my subpages are still ranked well or dropped only few (2-5) positions down.

I e-mailed to [e-mail], [e-mail] but got no response for 2 weeks now.

very frustrated.

[msndude]

xspace: Is your home page indexed at all? Can you find it with a url: query? If not, are you sure your robots.txt files isn't excluding it? Remember that MSN treats eveything in robots.txt as case-independent, so if you exclude "/I" you've excluded your own index.htm page.

Failing that, feel free to send me a sticky with your url and I'll see if there's something else wrong with it.

[asiaseo]

Ours have gone down to a trickle from main msn.com but a surge from ninemsn.com ( Australia ).

[Martin40]

red widgets
white widgets
blue widgets

So what do you do if you sell widgets of many varieties? Invent aliases for widgets?

[xspace]

msndude: yes, index page for my each domain is indexed. I tried url:mydomain.com and site:mydomain.com.

My robots.txt is simple:
User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10

[katheesue]

So what do you do if you sell widgets of many varieties? Invent aliases for widgets?

If you sell many varieties of widgets, you will just have to get traffic from somewhere else than MSN.

What I don't understand is that we are not talking about selling widgets.

Even if you are simply providing widget information, you get excluded if your list of categories is considered too long by a human reviewer at MSN.

To me, this seems like telling the librarians that if you use the Dewey Decimal System you can only use three top level categories (rather than ten) and that no use of decimal points in a number will be allowed or you will get banned.

By the way, I would pick categories 500, 600 and 800 and drop all the rest if that was required.

There is not much useful information in those other categories anyway.

[msndude]

I think it doesn't disclose any secrets to tell people that Microsoft does not actually use the Dewey Decimal System for MSN Search, nor do we require human reviewers to approve sites before we show results from them. :-)

[katheesue]

... but human reviewers at msn can decide that a site which uses a "Dewey Decimal System"-like categorization scheme is spam by definition?

... and cause the library of Congress site to vanish from the msn index?

I don't recall seeing any response to the commentary about ontology and taxonomy.

[msndude]

A search for "Library of Congress" brings up loc.gov as the #1 result, and I think that's correct. How are you issuing the query? I'm using this:

[search.msn.com...]

[jakegotmail]

Our authority site comepletly dropped out of search engines for thousands of terms we used to rank for. Can still find site if you put in "oursitename.com" into MSN. But that is the only way. "oursitename" brings up nothing. Let alone any of the normal very competitive terms we used to rank for like "red widgets" etc. etc.

Seems as if site gets no value for anything now. Happened on July 7th. Im clueless. Nothing was done on or prior to that date regarding link structure or external links.