MSN Spills on Link Penalties
October 17th, 2006 by pamela
Over at SEO Scoop there is a post concerning a site penalised by MSN for “exchanging links with sites unrelated to … site content”. Surely linking with sites not in the same thematic group should only be considered ineffective and not illegal? If thematically unrelated links can prompt MSN to penalise a site, surely many worthy and relevant sites will have problems making the grade on MSN and therefore struggle to gain traffic from the site, making links from potentially unrelated, but traffic driving sites, all the more important?
October 18th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Not sure how trust worthy this is as a source as these response emails are usually written by customer service agents who have no knowledge of the algorithm.
We’ve encountered this kind of thing previously where Google Adwords representatives had been advising clients on natural ranking factors which are clearly out of their area of expertise.
Also, if you examine any of the results in MSN, it’s hard to find any evidence of them heavily penalising un-themed links.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Absolutely, I should have said that this isn’t to be taken literally, perhaps more investigation is needed here because as you say, we have had this type of experience before and there doesn’t really seem to be any evidence to back it up.
October 18th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Its pretty much a judgement call and almost impossible to enforce. one of the basic rules of using links to determine a set of SERPs is you can’t let other people cause your site problems simply by adding non-related links.
of course that doesnt mean that it can’t be done, but if every site was penalised for “non related” links it would be chaos. A better solution is just to ignore them.
looks like MSN still has a bit of work to do…