MSN Live Search banned my site?

[ThreeD]

I have had a site up and running for almost two years now. When entering the two words of the domain (#*$!#*$!x.com) into live search (over at live.com) I get almost 50 million hits. For almost two years my site was ranked #1 on the first page.

Now, that's all great and it has given me a massive amount of traffic, but two weeks ago I made one significant change. I added google adsense on my site! When I went to live.com to do a search today, I saw that my site was gone and it is in fact not listed on live search at all anymore. I can enter any combination of my domain, it won't show up.

Has anyone ever experienced such a problem? I have no idea where to start, where to look or how to apporach this problem.

Thanks for any feedback or help!

[eMax]

it looks like they do it regularly on some of my websites ...

[bwnbwn]

Threed try putting up microsoft ads and see if ya bounce back I dont think anybody can help ya here as there is just to many things that could cause this.

From being that d fast I highly doubt it was the Google adsense ad but be intresting to see if adding their ads brings ya back...

[ThreeD]

hey bwnbwn, I'm not sure I can add other ads on the site when I have google adsense running.

I've decided to give up on Live search, their search function is inferior to google so we're focusing mainly on google for now.

When I enter [thewebsiteurlhere.com...] now it won't show up on live.com at all. Oh well..

[5ubliminal]

If they were nice enough to you to send you traffic why would you backstabb them like that? You had it coming.

You might consider cloaking Google Ads for the msnbot :) Might help ... or get you banned for good. Use at your own risk.

PS: Or add MS ADS on site. It's the politically correct thing to do when they send you traffic.

[ag_47]

Yea. How much traffic does Google provide you? If you're ranked somewhere 50+ there, then maybe focus on ms?

[Receptional Andy]

Adsense getting you banned from Live search is quite clearly a non-starter as it is easy to find sites using adsense within their results.

I would follow their advice at their webmaster help pages:

Your website disappears from Live Search results [help.live.com]

[BillyS]

Some of us have been banned for unknown reasons. I must have sent them five or six emails over the last two years. Everytime, after a long discussion back and forth, it goes back to "ranking is automated..." You'll get the same response on their webmaster helpless page. (And there is nothing wrong with my website, it's been featured several times on the television as well as frequent mentions on the radio.)

I've come to conclude this happens for one of two reasons:

1 - The folks at MS support are liars.
2 - The folks at MS have no idea how their search engine really works. <- my bet is with this reason

As a shareholder in MS I'm quite upset with how they've chosen to run search.

[Reno]

I'm pretty sure your second conclusion is the reason that MSN/Live performs so poorly. And I suspect that is in large part what is behind Microsoft's purchase of Fast, and their ongoing attempt to get Yahoo -- their own engineers just can't get it. I'll leave it to others to judge how well MS designs software -- certainly their $$ success is impressive -- but when it comes to search technology, their in-house people are falling short. So, they'll buy some outside expertise to see if that helps. Personally, I hope they are denied Yahoo, as I fear they'll ruin that service too, and in any case, we need more competition, not less....

......................................

[ag_47]

True.. They have become successful with Windows, they should probably stick with it - and focus all (or almost all) effort in windows. Considering ie7 is a joke and vista...

[rytis]

Live search does reinclude.

I have a friend whose one site was banned since Sept 2006. Just kidding, it is my site :)

On that site I was doing something that's totally ok from business ethics perspective, but has become a sin of sins from Search Engines perspective, because of algos being vulnerable to this.

Anyway, about 2 months following MSN/Live ban, I became a good boy and removed few thousands of "irrelevant" manually exchanged reciprocal links to otherwise great sites, only many of them having little to do with my site theme.

Waited patiently 6-7 more months, nothing. Then applied for reincusion (see link by Receptional Andy), confessed, and voila - back in SERPS.

I assume the reason for ban was reciprocal links, as there isn't anything else breaking SE's rules, and no other radical changes made. But who knows, could be a combination of nasty competitor report + incompetent 3rd party manual reviewer hired by MSN, these things happen. Live did not tell me the reason for ban, it is understandable and I did not expect them to tell me.

The point is, try to clean up following SE's rules however you dislike them, look critically, clean up more, apply for reinclusion.

[Balle]

After having had my site compleatly delisted for about 1-1½ year I too have had my site reincluded recently. YEEEH :-)

I did have a small hand edited directory on this website with on-topic reciprocal links only. This was only about 10 pages with 10-20 links on each page - nothing automated.

I recently removed all these link pages and replaced them with one single page with links (not reciprocals - just links to websites i like). I think that is what made my reinclusion request sucessfull - but who knows. It's a nice and unique website too - that might have helped too.

[textex]

Don't get too excited. We had a site bounce back about one month ago....only to disappear again last week.

[Reno]

Same thing happened to me -- for one of my "Invisible in MSN/LIVE" sites, most pages re-appeared for a short while, then it went down again to just 2 or 3. I've stopped worrying about the situation -- something is obviously wrong and they obviously have no idea how to fix it.

....................................

[Balle]

Fingers crossed then.

[walrus]

<After having had my site compleatly delisted for about 1-1½ year I too have had my site reincluded recently.>

Exactly the same for me, took over one year and now its back in too.
Well, better late than never i guess. Thanks MSL.

[Reno]

Well, better late than never i guess.

I don't mean to spoil your excitement, but prepare yourself for another possible drop.

I went from a full indexing prior to Oct '07, to only the home page, to about 2/3 of the pages a couple months ago, to 4 pages today. The current MSN/Live is so undependable I can no longer allow myself to even be hopeful that they're on track.

..................................

[walrus]

<I don't mean to spoil your excitement>

Hehe, after reading Tex's post and remebering their track record i hav'nt got to excited. Its only a little traffic anyways but it all adds up.

[Balle]

Just a little update from here:

At one point Live had indexed 2000+ pages of my site now it's down to about 400....

But I expirianced a LOT of trafic from some wierd general keywords such as "Internet" - not internet but a very similar keyword.