Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges

A Search Engine Watch Forums post has the first documented, public, case, that I have seen of someone receiving an email from the Live (MSN) Search team for being banned for using link exchanges. Here is the email as reported in the forums:

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

So, Microsoft is making an effort on spam. But I believe, not 100% sure, the way Google handles unrelated links to your site, is by not banning your site, but not counting those links. Unless, of course, it is a clear and transparent attempt for you to hurt the search results.

Of course, I do believe Google applies the Minus 30 penalty to some sites participating in some link exchanges or communities that are outright done for the purpose of ranking well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

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posted rustybrick in Microsoft MSN Search at November 20, 2006 7:40 AM Comments (7)

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This is a reaction to the heavy public ridiculing that MSN was taking in SEO blogs and forums about their ease of SEOing....But they are overreacting - because quality sites are still quality sites - and the users of MSN are not the most savy searchers on earth - so they end up losing by NOT getting full access to important material or services....

Do a search on MSN for the term BOOKS - do you NOT se THREE sponsor links ABOVE the organic SERPs - as well as a right column FULL of sponsor as links.

Their new algos will probably detect if the sites being link from have similar keywords to the sits they are linking to (similar to ASK.COM Algos) - then after a certain threshhold - MSN's algos will bannish the sites form their SERPs....

This is a great time to analyze the SERPS for the term SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION & ONLINE CASINOS & VIAGRA & Link Exchange & SEO etc....

those who did in fact rise and survive must have seen this coming

Also it would be great time to compare MSN to ASK - because they are now using similar link analysis

Posted by Search Engines WEB at November 20, 2006 08:57

Yep, I mentioned this a little over a month ago at this post. Interesting stuff, if only because it is nice to see actual reasons for penalties from a search engine.

Posted by DazzlinDonna at November 20, 2006 09:10

How did I miss that Donna. Thanks for sharing!

Posted by Barry Schwartz at November 20, 2006 09:16

Yea I remember Donna posting this up a while back. Can't see benefits for Live though, does that really put them ahead in any way? Nah.

Posted by Barry at November 20, 2006 16:26

don't mis-interpret.. link exchange is a perfectly beneficial method of generating traffic when it's done in natural volume for the benefit of the end user.

What this engineer meant was avoid high volume irrelevant link exchange. Maintain editorial discretion when making link exchanges - only link for the end user and keep volume low/natural.

Posted by Jerry Kallen at November 24, 2006 12:06

“High volume irrelevant link exchange” aren’t they simply talking about avoiding link farms?

Posted by hawaiian at December 11, 2006 11:53

They completely banned me in mid late summer after the live switch over but not right away, gradually like a nasty disease that eats at you until your dunzo! Anyway, my sites are all content based legitimate pages that are ranked highly on google and yahoo!
This only sets them farther behind the $470.00 per share giant goog. and yahoo because they are doing right by descent sites and msn is just 'out there'!
Cheers,
http://loan.valueprep.com my loan site:)

Posted by Brian at January 4, 2007 19:04

Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges

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