Forum Moderators: mack
MSNBot is still visiting.
Possible causes:
1. Recent 301 Apache .htaccess redirection, of my tertiary web sites, to sub-directories of mysite.com
2. Over-optimisation,
3. Some 'Doorway page'-like content (but site has relatively few mediocre pages, compared to overall site page number),
4. MSN doesn't like my content?
'1.' Is the most unusual thing I've done recently. I have other sites like:
www.my-blog.com
www.my-freeware.com
www.my-music.com
... which I've 301 redirected to mysite.com, for
reasons of brand consistency.
Any clues gratefully appreciated. Site is showing OK in Yahoo and Google. I've submitted queries to MSN support and their spam team, but I understand that might take a while :)
If you have any pointing they seriously penalize your site and your rankings suffer.
If you have many paid links they ban you and your site slowly is unindexed from msn.
I found a page on another forum about doing a MSN re-inclusion request, so I'll try that.
Any other red flags, please tell me, O wise ones!
I wasn't aware MSN Live existed, or of their spam clampdown.
[webmasterworld.com...]
some pages, including the homepage, were put back in the index, but now it's all gone again so I can assume it's been banned. Any spam would be purely accidental, because for all the work it takes maintaining and the pennies that site is capable of making it wouldn't be worth the wear and tear on the keyboard to bother spamming - even if someone knew how and cared to. :D
- MSN is now aggessively going after spam;
- Link exchanges are bad;
- If you delete your links _to_ the exchange, but your partners links _to you_ remain, you're still scr*wed;
- Paid links are bad;
- If your site looks low quality when reviewed by a human, you'll stay out.
Low quality means affiliate. Good quality means the leaders in the field, established companies. Thin sites with a few on-topic incoming links are good. Keyword domain names are good.
One thing which occurred to me: I've written a lot of free-reprint articles (good ones!). Byline hyperlinks were to content off-topic of the article content. The usual spammy-style sites reprinting them could look like a link exchange network.
Will report more in due course.
From memory: A poster on another forum was told by MSNDude that if he was still linked _to_ by a link exchange, there was nothing they could do. The thread was on #*$!, I think, and was very interesting.
From MSN's point of view I'd guess that losing a certain type of site is not a big deal, as there are plenty of ones on the same theme to take its place in the SERPs.
=====
To get back in MSN:
Go to [msn.com...] and type:
site:www.yourdomain.com
in the search box. If no results returned ...
Then use:
[support.live.com...]
They reply by asking you to read this:
[search.msn.com...]
The nub of which is to send a (succinct) re-inclusion request to
webspam @ microsoft.com
You should whitelist 'microsoft.com' if you're using SpamAssassin on your emails, as their emails sometimes trip spam filters.
====
It is also possible for your competitors to get you booted out of MSN:
[boogybonbon.com...]
This can be fixed by follwing the advice in the second post here (for HTML pages):
[webmasterworld.com...]
==========
My opinion: If what is tripping their filter is still pertinent to your site, manual reinclusion won't help, as you'll be filtered out again. They need to refine their algorithm.
Might be worth while, if your ban persists, to set up a sister site just for MSN, and discourage crappy links to it.
What was interesting about (another) #*$! forum post was that the excluded site did seem a bit cheesy, the owner debated this, and MSNDude said 'we stick by our opinion'.
I think you guys have the answer, their spam algorithm is just not working. Filtering legit sites and keeping blospot spam is not the way to go.
Now if they want to stick with it then bye bye MSN, I will miss 10% of the traffic Google provides me with ...I can live with it.
From the business and technical prospective, on MSN end, it is still terribly ridiculous and incompetent.
The funny part is that MSNbot keeps crawling the sites. They should save it, since they banned the site or whatever glitch they have again.
If Windows Vista is as efficient and logical as MSN/Live search I think I will pass...
....:)
A comment from a rep of a search engine is far from hard data and should never be taken as gospel.
MSN search has been a literal mess for a few months now.
Not everything is by design.
My remarks are based on my impressions only, from looking at forum posts here and on another popular forum. They are designed to collate likely causes of a ban.
I'm _guessing_ that link exchanges, the Co-op, and _maybe_ links from articles hosted on sites like blob.throwawaydomain.info (in my case) _might_ be a cause.
I have links from articles I wrote. The only other oddities on my site are the three or four redirects I've done from my tertiary sites to my main site, and fairly heavy SEO.
Also, another poster in this forum said he'd moved webhosts, and got banned. Cause and effect? I can't say.
_If_ the MSN algorithm is inferior to Google's, and _if_ they're looking to clean house, this could be the result.
I've gone through the re-inclusion process, and am waiting for a reply from the webspam team, if I get one. This can take weeks, from memory. Anyone else affected should do so also, and post here. Then we'll know.
As I can't change my site, I'm not hopeful, but some clues would be useful.
PS: The standard MSN bot appears to have stopped visiting my site, I think. The others ones 'Products' and 'media' still visit.
Still banned from the index; no pages listed at all, the site:www.mysite.com command returns nothing.
I'm not holding my breath, but I wonder if this is a good sign?
After August 06 update: After much testing, I lowered KW density...all my pages are back up and ranking well on MSN.
*Here is what I found...use KW no more that 2 times in Description Meta Tags.
*Keep overall page density under 3%.
DON'T over optimize Meta Tags or Page Body...
choose 3 or 4 KW's in your Description and use no more than 2 times...all others 1 time.
Use the same KW's for page body and keep in the 3% range. All other page body KW's keep at 1% to 2%.
Yahoo also seems to like this density...traffic has increased.
Google is not a big traffic generator for us yet, so I can't say.
If Google is your main SE with plenty of traffic, I wouldn't touch a thing, however if MSN and Yahoo are your main SE's...the above worked well for us.
Hope this helps.
Fish Texas
Google and Yahoo liking people's sites, and MSN not, seems to be a theme from other posts I've read, which suggests it would be better to develop a site just for it, if you want to rank on it.
