Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Recently, I had a website successfully reincluded back into MSN/Live’s web search. As one of the first websites I built – way back in 2005 - there were several (dare I say more) questionable methods of promotion and link building as I learned the in’s/out’s of being a webmaster. Throughout it’s life, this site has been penalized/banned in all three major search engines at one point or another – in fact it’s still banned in Yahoo.

At any rate, this post is about MSN/Live (whatever they prefer to be called now). For the past two years I’ve been trying to get the website back into Live, during which the website in question has been on the straight and narrow. I have submitted several reinclusion requests, fired off emails, etc. – all to no avail. Recently MSN has been turning it’s attention to webmasters with their new tools system, and with a new webmaster forum. After verifying the website wasn’t “banned” through MSN’s webmaster tools, I asked for help in their forum.

A quick response was posted by Brent Young, verifying the website was being penalized and offered to help. A couple weeks later, the website is ranking for most of the keywords it used to. Success! So, essentially I want to inform other webmasters what they should do in the even they believe their website is being penalized by MSN/Live Search – taken from a advice posted by Brent:

Please review our Guidelines for successful indexing to ensure that you are not doing anything that would get your site blocked in the future.

In the webmaster tools there is a link to submit your site for reinclusion if it is blocked or if you suspect that your website was incorrectly identified as spam, please do the following:

1. Open the Live Search Site Owner support form.
2. In the boxes provided, type your name and e-mail address.
3. In the What type of problem do you have? list, select Other.
4. In the box provided, describe the issue, including the following information:
   • The search words that you use
   • The URL
   • Request re-inclusion

So there you have it, a new (and very helpful) way to get feedback from MSN. I think it’s great they have offered such an intuitive way to interact with the Live Search staff. If only Google and Yahoo would take note, and be more involved with answering questions and working with webmasters to correct potential issues so that both parties can improve.