Howdy ya'll,
I have two sites, both are about an island in the Caribbean. One of the search terms that gets me some decent traffic from adwords is St. Widgets Island (widgetized per TOS). The commercial site has adsense and some hotel aff links on it, it ranks top 30 in both G and Y! for this search term, but does not rank at all on MSN's beta. The commercial site has plenty of backlinks and various PR ranging from 2-5.
The non-comercial site has no adsense or aff links, it does have a G search bar. It ranks #1 on beta, 4 on Y! and does not rank top 1000 on G. It has almost no backlinks and PR ranges 1-3, most of which is passed from cross linking between these two sites. The search term is not in the sites URL.
So based on this tiny thing if I had to make one assumption, I would think that MSN downgrades sites with Adsense and or aff links. Unfortunately, I doubt that this one incident proves anything.
Has anyone studied this or seen similiar situations?
