November 20, 2006

According to some, Live.com would be banning certain Web sites that take part in spammy or irrelevant link exchange campaigns designed to corrupt and mislead search engines into ranking those sites higher.

Barry Schwartz looks at a thread from Search Engine Watch which published an email from Live.com to a publisher:

(From Live.com) "Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with other sites that are unrelated to your site content. Various techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated links in order to increase ranking are considered spamming and as a result your Web site has been excluded from our index. Please contact Live.com once you’ve removed these offending links and we will reevaluate the situation."

Barry Schwartz adds on his blog: “Microsoft is apparently making an effort in combatting search engine spam. However, I believe that the way Google handles unrelated links to your site isn't banning it but simply not counting said links. Unless it is a clear and transparent attempt for you to deliberately hurt the search results.”

Microsoft is sending a powerful message to these spammers via the ban, because if sites do continue to use these link farms and spammy techniques, they are going to hurt overall search results that another search engine is going to be affected.

And given Google’s stance towards link farming, it can also be assumed that if a business has participated in such questionable tactics, the motivation was either miseducation and/or to simply spam Live.com.

Maybe a linking or SEO educational program from Live.com to publishers would be in order, and once a site passes the program they are then allowed for reinclusion in Live.com's index.

Source: Search Engine Journal