Documented email from the Live Team:

"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"

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006742.html

I'm not seeing any kind of global effect on the searches I've done. I suspect this was a hand-edit on a spam report but what a nice reply and they're obviously tossing those that they do catch.

Good info.

I have seen similar elsewhere as well. MSn and YAhoo seem to handle with banning and hand edits while Google handles things aglorithmically by de-valuing the links.

Best

Eric

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Eric Blackwell
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So... they allow relevant content link exchanges... Neat .

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Nicholas May | Creative Linking | Real Estate Webmasters

>>So... they allow relevant content link exchanges... Neat .

Obviously the keywords to this rare reply are "unrelated spam links"; how each reviewer interprets these words will be the interesting part of the process. One can imagine the renewed influx of competitor spam reports after this mail made the rounds.

For all related parties who got banned. If your site gets handpicked to get spammed, simple solution, resubmit your site to the MSN spiders. Sadly it lets you back in. http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD

I guess it's not terribly surprising that a process which appears to be manual (the initial selection of sites), would then allow you to simply resubmit a site and not get flagged again. Nonetheless, the process is not sound, but I think it's challenging us to make steps towards different linking scenarios, if any at all, that are continuing to be discussed on this site and others.

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