Need help on why sites no longer ranked in MSN

msn search penalty

[adamsmith]

First of all, I apologize for putting the domain names here, I am NOT looking for traffic to these sites. Please only visit these sites to analyze this problem:

both of these sites refinanceDOTnet and refinanceDOTorg were penalized in the MSN search results for "refinance".

- Both have different owners
- Both have different content
- There are minimal shared links and no interlinking
- There are minimal backlinks from blogs
- There are no current DMCA claims against either site

I genuinely do not have an idea why these sites were penalized. The previously were in the top 5 on MSN for refinance (one for over a year, one for about a month).

Can anyone offer any onpage reasons why the sites were penalized? (I think this is the most likely problem).

If you think it is an offpage problem, what do you think that is?

Thank you in advance!

[Praxus]

I'll throw out a couple of suggestions - bear in mind its just guesses
and I could be wrong -

- the net site has tons of keyword packed image alt tags
- same with the .org site, although the org site is just generally packed all around with very commercial keywords.

If I were you, assuming you're optimizing for MSN, I'd get rid of all the alt tags and reduce the sheer number of financial keywords on the .org site