Why am I banned?

[seoapprentice]

Our site has been banned in MSN (site:www.domain.com shows 0 results). For years they loved our site, and without warning, we were banned! We have been very very conservative in optimizing our site and have not practiced any black-hat or even grey hat for that matter.

We do well in Google, but we were banned from Yahoo! for about a year, and after several re-inclusion attempts we were re-included. Note that we did not make ANY changes to the site to be re-included, nor did we ever have any black-hat on the site. It seems within a couple of months of being re-included in Yahoo we were banned in MSN!

The site in question is a very legit and professional website that has been chosen best of web for 7 years running by Forbes Magazine. We have never cloaked, hid text, stuffed, re-directed spammed, etc... If anyone would mind giving it a glance and maybe pointing me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

One thing I should mention is that we have several subdomains that are still included in the index, but they might as well not be as they've lost all their rankings.

[Elisabeth]

SEOapprentice,

typically we would stay away from discussing specifics, but since, as you said, it's a well known site, and to the best of your knowledge, as well as mine, has been done 'illegally', since several of my clients have been using that site for years.

So, this is a very interesting case to me- the word banning is probably a little strong, and I'd have to assume at first that this is simply a case of a technical issue of some sort. And as you know, the recent change to MSN Live Search may have something to do with it.

But the yahoo aspect of your history also raises the question, why did it disappear then and why did it get re-included.

I'll have to do a little more digging, and maybe you can provide us with some additional background on your side. Though, as you say, you do not believe you have done anything illegal in terms of SEM.

[seoapprentice]

Thanks Elisabeth,

I never understood why we were banned from Yahoo. The only thing I could come up with was that our subdomains did not have proper 301 redirects. This made domain.com/folder and folder.domain.com duplicates. This was fixed, but still took 6-8 months and at least 3 additional re-inclusion requests to get it back in.

The MSN Live switchover is why I haven't worried too much over this. I thought it would just level out and all would be fine again. However it has been a couple months now and still nothing. I did a re-inclusion request, and have heard nothing of course.

[glengara]

I notice in G a lot of your pages are supplemental possibly due to them indexing both the https/http versions, not sure if/how this might affect MSN though...

[HealthQuotes]

Hi all.

I also had a site that ranked very well for years that suddenly disappeared from MSN listings about 2 weeks ago.

I wondered if anybody has some more information to reent changes in their algorithm(s)?

[Big Juice]

I for one am not impressed by the new Live site. I am not saying this because my site has lost its ranking since the change. I have dozens of sites that maintain their #1 ranking for their targeted keywords. True I have a couple of sites that no longer rank like they used to but I attribute that to redesigns and changed architecture.

From my perspective it would appear that Live is trying to copy too many ideas from Google and Google is far too flawed for any search engine to emulate. After all isn’t a search engine based upon link popularity about as reliable as a political system based upon popularity? Sure both may deliver results but those results might not be the best that they could be.

Why is your site banned from Live you ask? Well it seems that one area you may want to look is at the links pointing to your site(s). Rumor has it that MSN has incorporated some stupid penalty for unrelated linking since it became Live.

If this rumored penalty by Live is correct, can you imagine how this penalty would adversely affect blogs? I can’t speak for anybody else’s blogs but I know my blogs cover many topics so does that mean that my blogs can acquire links from a wider array of sites due to a broader scope of topics? Or does that mean that links that once covered a similar topic or theme will now get my blog banned because my blog topic changed?

Search engines can do whatever they like in their efforts on trying to make a better product but when they come up with these alleged penalties without informing us, well… then… that sucks!

[Chris_D]

Hi SEO apprentice,

Did you see this thread: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/...ad.php?t=13348

HoTMeLter wrote:
Had a reply from MSN Spam Team. They said:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you've removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Live Search

Could that possibly apply to you also? No idea about the Yahoo! issue.

[IANGH]

our site www.jigsawjungle.com has recently had problems after being ranked well. I guess it was when Live search started we seemd to drop way down then disappeared. So we emailed the webspam address stating we felt we had been miss identified as a spam site and was relisted. We then started to advertise on msn and then seemed to be climbing back up the rankings. The we sent our newsletter out to subscribers and promptly disappeared again.

Any thoughts/ideas on this would be appreciated!

We now have just been relisted after re emailing the webspam address.