Msn-what Happened?

Disappeared

[seo2007123]

Hi everyone,
i really need your help.
Something happened to one of the sites i do SEO for on msn.com.
since mid october the site has dropped down significantly in major keywords and i saw that less pages were indexed. today i noticed that the URL of the site is not indexed any longer!
Nothing "bad" was done, and on google.com and yahoo.com everything is improving.
other sites i do seo remained the same with msn.com.
i suspect this has something to do with the fact that the webmaster has moved the site from one hosting to another and now we have our own dedicated server. could this effect in anyway msn's results?
could there be something in the server that is defined wrong and that prevents the msnbot from crawling?
i am VERY confused and devistated- can any1 help me out with this one?

[Mokita]

Do you have any of the new msnbots disallowed in robots.txt?

e.g. msnbot-products, msnbot-media, msnbot-news etc etc

[Receptional]

i suspect this has something to do with the fact that the webmaster has moved the site from one hosting to another and now we have our own dedicated server. could this effect in anyway msn's results?

Do a geo-lookup to find out whether the site is now hosted in the country you think it is hosted in... For example, 1&1 in the UK have their servers in Germany...

[seo2007123]

Hi,
the new server is located in the US (texas)
and as far as i know there are no limitations on robots in robots.tx file.
what elese could it be?
something in the server? firewall that prevents from crawling? i am just trying to understand how comes the site is not listed in msn?
p.s- there are many sites that link to us but our url is missing..
could it be that msn doesnt like if you have google analytics in your pages? or does it have a problem with the fact that our link exchange program is a subdomain? even if we did link to "bad neighbourhoods" (although i don't think we did)- would this be a reason to delete the url from their database?

[followgreg]

Welcome to the club...we too had our sites dropped.

the latest which is extremely stupid, is that MSN kept only the pages that are disallowed by robots.txt ....

Since the same sites that are apparently filtered or banned on MSN for whatever reason are doing extremely well (but REALLY WELL) on Google and even Yahoo I really have no more interest talking about MSN anymore, let them deal with their lack of understanding. You might reach the same conclusions as I did, not worth the trouble.
I hope your site will be back and I hope you can rely on GG, after all Google provides over 80% of the overall traffic ...

[seo2007123]

Hi,
Thanx for trying to cheer me up.
I am very determined in understanding the cause- the only thing that will do is to figure out why this happened- there must be a reason..No?
maybe i will take off all google analytic from the site, who knows maybe msn doesnt like that (although it doesnt punish other sites i promote that use analytics)

[dspringer]

Our site was just removed from MSN.com as well. We used to have phenominal rankings on MSN.

We didn't do anything different other than we just started a Pay Per Click campaign with MSN. Within a few days of setting up our campaign they completely removed our site from the organic listings.

I have tried contacting MSN.com every way possible. They are completely uninterested in helping us figure out what caused this to happen.

The whole thing has been very upsetting.

[Kelowna]

Hi All,

We have had several sites removed from msn lately, the only thing they had in common was that they were the most popular sites on Yahoo and Google. We are starting to think that having too many "good quality" links pointing to a site is bad with msn as sites with just a couple of inbound links from crappy low ranking sites are on the first page of the msn serps and the great content popular sites are being banned?

I guess if you want to rank on msn you need to find some old crap site, point just a couple garbage links to it and presto... top rankings! Oh Yea, make sure the site is completely off the topic of the inbound link text, remember, less is more..

[flanok]

Hi,
I also, have had my website completly removed from MSN, it was number one for a very competative term in the UK.

The only work I had done to the site previously was its .htaccess file, making sure I had no duplicate content for Google. Ie non www to www and index.htm to / etc.

I have read posts elswhere where a bit of .htaccess work had been done in the months prior to being removed from MSN.

Has anyone else had their site removed just after changing their .htaccess?

Mark

[simey]

Has anyone else had their site removed just after changing their .htaccess?

Yes, for the same reason.

[Rainie]

I changed my .htaccess file and my site was also removed. I did one other thing a few weeks earlier and that was add the no ODP meta tag.

[flanok]

is it worth starting a new thread to see how many sites have been removed just after they changed their .htaccess?

[BillyS]

>>Has anyone else had their site removed just after changing their .htaccess?

How would MSN even know if you changed your .htaccess? I changed mine recently to stop a hacker. What kind of changes are you making - mod_rewrite?

[flanok]

A few 301 redirects also

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.example.net/$1 [R=301,L]
Mark

[Balle]

Welcome to the club....

I know my site has been banned from MSN for having to many links pointing to it.

I do old fashioned reciprocal link exchanges with related sites of interest to my users. The site also have 2 side wide link exchanges with friends sites - boath sites are on the same topic.

My site is very popular so it also has many one way links from all kind of sites - most of them re-publich my news articles and in return some give a link back.

As far as I know I don't use any dirty SEO tricks - I love this site too much and have spend too much time and money building it to just flush it down the draine. But apparently that has happened anyway in MSN.

No link spam or black hat SEO has ever been used (to the best of my knowlage). Obviously I have never said no thanks to a link when I get the oppertunity - but I have never done any forum or blog spam or stuff like that.

I have purchased a couple of text links to get trafic and obviously to help rankings too but nothing major like some of my competitors. I have also submittet to every single directory I have been able to fine.

Now only searching for the URL brings up the site in MSN search - it used to rank well for it's main keywords. It does rank reasonably well in Yahoo and Google.

I have written MSN with no success. MSNDude did reply a long time ago and he confirmed that the problem was the link exchanges - I have tried to fix it but I guess MSNDude has received too many sticky mails to be able to reply.

I can not remove all the link exchanges since they are of value to my visitors and obviously they help Google and Yahoo to index the site.

So here we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Looking at the search results for the terms where my site used to rank - banning my site has defenitly not helped on improving the search engine result pages. The results are 95% junk now.

[steveb]

MSN can't consistently handle correctly designed 301s properly.

Can't do much about that, especially since Google is even more prone to make screw ups if 301s aren't there.

Webmasters are between a rock and a hard place (or more accurately, between two drunks swerving in opposite directions).

[Marcia]

I've had a site killed completely following a hosting change in combination with using 301's. Maybe there's something els4e I dont know about, but a change in IP numbers preceded the problems with that site and another site moved at the same time (also changed to unique IP) is still somewhat indexed but has never recovered.

[flanok]

I have both rewrites and 301s on the site that has been delisted.

My 301s are first and rewrites (i.e non www to www and index to / etc)
are on the last lines.
is this correct?

Would MSN read this better if the rewrites were first and 301s later?

Is there any specific rules?
Should it not make a difference?

Has anyone else who has had their site removed got theirs in the same order?

Mark

[Jordo needs a drink]

Just theorizing, but is it not so much the .htaccess MSN is having a problem with, but the 301's.

Is it possible that if you redirect the domain that MSN has you indexed as (maybe the non www one) to a domain it doesn't have you indexed as (the www one?), then it deletes the first domain from it's databases and starts the site all over using the second domain, including having to recrawl it?

[austtr]

Marcia....

Also did a hosting change about 2 months ago... moved the hosting to the same country as the site topic.

No effect on rankings... still #1 for its primary search term

Maybe its the 301's that the other posters are commenting on.

[Jordo needs a drink]

Read the other threads after posting above and there definitely seems to be a 301 problem.

[SteveWh]

>>Has anyone else had their site removed just after changing their .htaccess?

>How would MSN even know if you changed your .htaccess?

.htaccess is a protected system file, absolutely unavailable by web access unless the server is misconfigured. The only way modifying it could deny access to MSN is if you implemented "deny" lines that block them. Or if you block them with robots.txt.

The 301 thing looks highly likely. They appear to draw a distinction between www and non-www. I redirect all www to non-www. A Live Search on the non-www form turns up all my pages. The www form turns up no pages at all.

[seo2007123]

Thanks everyone,
good news-
My client's site is back in msn.
i wrote them asking to return it to the index.
i cleaned about 15 links to sites that msn might find problematic and now all is ok.
i am very happy and surprised it happened so fast

[flanok]

Hi,
Where did you write to?

And can you give an idea of what you were linking too that you think MSN, did not like.

Thanks

Mark

[RazvanG]

hi,

i also have a similar problem. ONe of my sites has also finalised of being totally deindexed without any issues on it.

I even wrote a topic here and discussed about it.

Check it out [webmasterworld.com...]

looking forward for more opinions

[flanok]

I dont seem to be able to get into the suporters forum.
I presume you have to subscibe
Mark

[RazvanG]

yes you have to subscribe to enter that forum

[seo2007123]

Hi All,
I have written MSN and told them about the problem. i have never received a confirmation that the issue would be solved but after one or two weeks the site got indexed back with the former rankings.
i had deleted about 15 links which i thought we would rather do without.
but again, i am really not sure that this is the issue.
here is what i suspect-
since the ranking has dropped gradually, i have noticed that the index page was the first to be deleted from the index- meaning that probobly when moving servers, msn relates to IP and couldnt find our site and dropped it from the index. this is why the index was deleted but other minor url's still remained on msn's cache.
later on these few pages were also deleted.
i then re-submitted the site and wrote MSN, and as i said, it all came back with the great ranmkings we had before.
good luck

[Marcia]

Yes, ausstr it's got a 301 but so do other sites of mine. The only 2 that seem to be having problems (one totally gone and one with the homepage MIA) are the ones on that server with a unique IP.

Re 301's, I've still got pages showing up with the cache showing the "page moved" message instead of having followed the redirect to the new page. If you do a site: search those are the first ones that turn up.

[Tomseys]

I've had a few sites dropped from their index recently and I didn't do anything out of the ordinary.