Dropped for Beta?

Major rankings a week ago, now nowhere.

[woop01]

Has anybody else experienced getting completely dropped from MSN Beta? I’m not talking about a site that never showed up in the rankings, this site was showing up in MSN Beta better than any other search engine it ranks in and it gets over 1,000 referrals a day from Google. A week ago, it ranked on the first page for 800,000+ volume keywords (Overture stats) but now not a single page is in the directory.

It’s not going to ruin business, we never depended on MSN traffic any way. It’s just strange to see this site dropped completely after ranking so well.

Has this happened to anybody else?

[Orange_XL]

Same here, some good results for a few keywords, but for most one one's, nowhere to be seen.

Haven't got a clue why :-(

[2by4]

Same here, on some terms, not all though. I haven't taken a close look to see if I can find what makes them favor their current selections, it should be fairly obvious.

My first guess is that they are implementing some form of pagerank, or turned up the knob on that more. That guess could be and probably is wrong, but it's my first impression.

What's odd is that they had my site number one for a keyword phrase, after the change, another page on the site, that only mentions that keyword phrase a single time, in a link to the main keyword phrase page, is now number 7, and the old page is lower, in the 20's I think. The old page is the one that's actually about the keyword phrase. Go figure.

[woop01]

I'm not talking about a few terms, I'm talking about a 100% drop of a site that was ranking quite well before. It doesn't even show up in a search for "mysite.com".

[2by4]

There was something more fundamental than just an algo tweak I think that happened. Your site getting completely dropped suggests that. Or they just switched databases to test something, and will switch back.

With this beta stuff you can only get so worried. Although my keywords had held pretty solid through the last month, the latest thing is definitely a change in how pages are being treated.

[woop01]

After speaking with somebody from MSN, a change to our robots.txt file caused this. Well, actually it was flat out deleted by mistake.

This was actually a pretty ethical thing for MSN to do.

Sorry for the false alarm.