Banned from MSN/Live Search?

[seoapprentice]

I'm puzzled. For years MSN loved our site. #1's all over the place. We haven't changed anything, and we don't black hat but our site is now banned (since about a week ago). I'm not really concerned as even though we used to rank 1 for our most competitive terms our traffic was next to nothing from MSN.

However, on a personal note I'm hurt ;). Our site is a classy site, with no stuffing, cloaking, bad neighbors, hiding, spamming or anything of that nature. We don't have any AdSense (or external ads of any sort), our titles and descriptions are good, our content is unique and we have great IBLs from trusted related sources (DMOZ, Y! Directory, .gov, .edu, .org).

Possible problems:

1. We do have several subdomains (with proper 301's from the folder to subdomain). These are virtually uneffected by this bann. Only the top level has been banned.

2. We do exchange links from very selective sites. We have a staff member that validates all request for link exchanges and only selects high quality relative sites. We also constantly monitor these links to make sure the quality remains.

Any suggestions? Maybe a top N list of ways to get banned from MSN? I submitted a re-inclusion request a couple days ago...we'll se how that goes.:)

Thanks in advance!
(If you would be interested in looking at the site please PM me)

[simleon]

I need your site url to give u an idea of what happend.

Simone

[seoapprentice]

Well no reply from MSN, not even an automated response. No change in our ban status either. The subdomains are still indexed, though not ranking as well as when the main domain wasn't banned.

I dug around to find what changes may have caused this and the only change that I found (other than additional unique content) was a new link in the global header navigation that links to one of the subdomains. Could this give me any penalties?

I'd really like to find out what's going on, but with the silence from MSN I have no idea where to start. :(

[ScottG]

If you search for just the main urls ala:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site.com&FORM=MSNH
or
http://www.live.com/?q=site.com&FORM=LVSP&scope=web&x=0&y=0

where you replace site.com with your site, do you find that your URL is indexed?

[seoapprentice]

Nope. If I use just site.com instead of www.site.com I see all my subdomains, but nothing at the top level.

[Marcia]

I just caught site of this older thread again and think it needs renewed attention because there is a difference in the way MSN/Live search handles the root of sites - non-www - and a subdomain - including www. - and that difference can lead to problems.