Is MSN in a black hole?

MSN Errors

[gehrlekrona]

From all the posts here lately about MSN it is always about problems. Problems with 301 redirects, sites disappear suddenly, can't use their submit page and God knows what else.
I know we usually cry out here when there is something wrong and never post anything positive but for the last months there has been nothig positive to report when it comes to MSN.
I guess MSNDude either got tired of us whining about things or he got to much on his hands so he doesn't have time to visit anymore, or he just thinks that it is not fun to watch all these error reports about his company.
have been watching MSN closely lately (since my sites got banned by IP(?), whois info(?)) and I haven't figured out yet what they think they are doing. I am wondering if they know themselves what they are doing and if they keep it up they have become a self destructing Search Engine and nobody will use it in the near future.
It seems like they look at Google and other SE's and say "Hey, that's great thinking. Let's do it backwards and we'll be special"
Can't figure out why a site has a top ranking in other SE's and MSN won't even list the site? Now, how dumb is that? What have they done to their algo so they ban sites that have a PR5 or PR6 in Google? How come MSN think they are so special and can do this and not loose visitors?I know I am not going to use it anymore :( They can disappear into the Back hole any day I won't even miss them!

[gehrlekrona]

Got a site that have been banned? PM me your URL and I'll have a look at it. There might be some loogic in the madness from what I see in the results in Live.com.

[Marcia]

Might be some insights in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

And check out the new thread I posted on the index.html problem if homepages went AWOL first.

[gehrlekrona]

@Marcia,
Yeah, I started that thread :)

I tried your suggestions but didn't work on my site(s) :(
One of my site have some "left over" pages that I redirected after changing to another "translation software" and I tried your suggestions on that one but none of it worked for that site.

I am pretty sure that they run old sites and new sites through a filter and this new filter tells them if it is a "spam site" or not. If they deem it to be a spam site then you're gone in a heart beat even if you only do white hat!

[Marcia]

The 301 in .htaccess for index.html works on some sites of mine, on one server - but NOT other sites with a different host.

[walkman]

MSN Dude,
if a site is labeled as spam and removed, will msnbot still spider it to reconsider or a re-inclusion is the only way out?

[gehrlekrona]

Ithink they said somewhere that if it has been removed you need to "Convince them that you have removed anything that caused it to be considered as a spam page"...
Not sure where you tell them that though :(

[night707]

MSN report does not help at all and their bots are consuming only huge bandwidth without creating any traffic.

Yesterday for example their bot bl1sch4091106.phx.gbl soaked up 400 MB videos and despite being on many Live search No.1 pages for elementary keywords we receive no traffic at all.

Only for a few hours MSN Traffic had even been bigger than the Google traffic for our entire site. In fact all went to an important page deep within the site with even very little to offer.

Microsoft does not seem to care much about quality. That is my feel.