Live / Microsoft is now closely monitoring back links and the location sources of the links.

Some webmasters have received the following email from Live (MSN).

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 revaluate.

__________________
Domainmonster.com Customer Support Team.
Domain Name Registration Information & Resources.

Are you sure these are genuine?

Perhaps I'm wrong but I can't see a search engine (especially one of the top 3) bothering to email site owners regarding why their site has been delisted etc and indeed where did they get the persons email address from to do this as it could be construed as UCE/SPAM itself if the site has been spidered at some time and not submitted.

What is an inappropriate link. Does this mean that I have to trawl the web looking for people who have linked to my site for some reason and ask them to remove the link because their site content is not relevant to mine? Lots of people provide links purely as a way of publicising the services/makes/vendors they use without their being any direct relationship.

If MSN are doing this then I can only think they have identified a list of 'spam link sites' that just provide back links in order to boost ratings and using these to spot sites who are trying to bump their back link count.

But again you may not have submitted it and have no control over the entry (if you can find it).

All sounds a bit dubious to me. Still if they are doing it I guess its useful as long as they disclose in the email the list of sites that are linking to you and causing the problem so that you can do something about it. As you have been delisted you won't be able to do search to find out who they are.....

Perhaps its just a spam email to get lots of people to complain to MSN.

If its true how long before you are held to ransom to have your site from a recognised spam link site?

__________________
Duncan Berriman
http://www.ippatrol.co.uk/
website and server monitoring

Hi. Julian who posted this is away for the next 3 weeks enjoying the sunshine of Australia, so I'll answer on his behalf, although haven't been a party to the original info.

It does kind of make sense. Something has to be done about link farming and in some respects good on MSN for making the first move, allbeit now wide open for the equivalent of a search engine DOS attack on your listings as you rightly state.

The simple theory of backlinks is a good one. The more people linking to your site, the more important you must be on the web. I guess what each of the engines is trying to do, is to do this in a more intellignet way.

Google kind of started the trend by applying more importance to a backlink that comes from a higher PR/equivelant of PR site than from an un-important site. It then progressed that to start looking at how relevant the content from the linking site was and then the relevance of the actual link. A decent start on checking out that your links are of true value and really should count.

I would suspect MSN are now trying to do something similiar whilst looking to make it even better. If they aren't doing it already, I would suspect they are focusing more on link farms and simply giving them an equivalent google style low PR so that link doesn't carry the same importance, rather than be negative so to speak. If they are giving it negative weight, then of course it does open up the whole Search Engine DOS attack thing and create a big problem...which no doubt...they will soon recognise as they experience one themselves from the usual anti MS clan.

Anyway, just my views and I guess as always with Search Engines, their algorithms and theorys are very closley guarded and all discussion is going to be speculative until the masses are seeing the problem or benefit. If they do stick their neck out and get it right, then they achieve better results and we all start to use them over google...remember this is exactly why google became so big in the first instance...it gave you the results you wanted, not the zillions of rows of adsense content that you now don't want.

Anyway, maybe I can encourage Julian to put forward his views on his next visit to an Internet Cafe by the beach!

__________________
Domainmonster.com Management Team.
Domain Name Registration Information & Resources.

Are they banning completely or is it similar to Google's Minus 30 points rule?

It does sound pretty harsh though. Like DJ says, what's an appropriate or inappropriate link? I'm guessing that there'd have to be an inordinately high number of links for them to pick up on it in the first place.

Edit: *whoops didn't see the above post there!* :P

__________________
::burning my teeth in the sun::