Ranking Problems With Site Name

Ranking Dropped in MSN for Our Name

[BillyS]

Not good. I just noticed that my website no longer ranking well for its own name - now ranking at number 36.

Interestingly, there are directories and even my rss feeds that are outranking the site for its name. Something's not right.

Anyone else seeing this? I just saw this today.

[Shurik]

IMO this is their new "spam penalty" kicking in. They demoted your site (as well as mine) to the point that it cannot even rank for its own name. A fair number of my competitors got demoted as well. I sent them an email a week ago but so far nothing.

I believe they (msn team) are not doing it right. They actively punishing sites for something that is beyond webmaster’s control. If MSN search ever gets popular I can see emergence of tens of thousand splog links to top listings to bring them down. I wonder what will then MSN do when all the decent sites have plenty of splog links pointing to them?

[msndude]

Just because I don't respond immediately doesn't mean I didn't hear you. :-) Some problems don't have immediate answers -- we have to study them. Others are "fixed in the next release," but since I won't preannounce anything, I'll never say that. In some cases the technology is in enough flux that it's better for me to wait a month or so for it to settle down. And, of course, I actually can't respond personally to every message anymore -- even though I try to.

I will say, though, that we do not intend to create a situation where bad guys can destroy the reputation of a good site simply by pointing splogs at it.

[BillyS]

>>Just because I don't respond immediately doesn't mean I didn't hear you.

If there is one thing I've learned it's this - "patients grasshopper." I'm only posting an observation that I made this morning. I consider myself a pretty big MSN supporter. As a matter of fact, in a perfect world I'd like MSN, Y!, Ask and Google all to have about the same market share of search because I believe competition will bring about better results.

I hope this comment wasn't directed at me because I certainly don't want msndude to think I'm impatient - because I'm not.

[Shurik]

I didn't expect an immediate change either and certainly didn't demand one.
After my past experience dealing with google I was pleasantly surprised to get a response from Msndude at all on this subject matter.
Lately number of people observed changes in MSN SERPs. Not all the changes are to the best. It seems that content plays ever lesser role. User experience seems not to matter at all. I wonder if the concept of using "learning neural net" which was supposed to produce superb ranking is now abandoned in favor of google's way of ranking things.