TigerTom does it again! This time, I got banned by MSN. And I had plenty of company. Another algorithm update, another sea of tears. I managed to contact MSNDude at Webmasterworld.com before he got promoted/fed up, and get my site back in. God be praised!
Here’s a suggestion if a re-inclusion request doesn’t work, and you can’t get an MSN bod to review your ban:
Set up a crafty de-optimised mirror of your site, using Apache mod_rewrite. IMPORTANT: Bots and humans coming from MSN should get the same version of your site, otherwise your competitors could lobby for you to be hand-banned. Also, the different versions should look the same to a human; just toggle the optimisation a bit.
Ultimately, I suggest three versions of your site; one for Google and the rest, one for MSN and one for Yahoo.
More here:
http://www.tigertom.com/writes-about/banned-by-msn.html
What I don’t know is if banning MSNbot for a while, then letting it back in to your ‘cloaked’, de-optimised mirror will work. If a hand un-banning is required to kick-start a re-inclusion, there are going to be a lot of unhappy webmasters out there.
Google’s business is search. MSN’s is Windows; I’ll bet they don’t have many people dedicated to placating angry webmasters.