More MSN Rank Problems

Most of my pages bombed out big time on the MSN Search in the past day or so. I was ranking 1+2 for pretty much all of my targtered keywords, and using the DigitalPoint keyword ranking tracker, atleast half of them have dropped off the face of the planet (upwards of 10,000 spots).

I am targeting The Melbourne Cup, which is an Australian horse race happening here in a month. My main site is www.melbournecupodds.com and its been ranking very very well until yesterday. Search phrases such as 'Melbourne Cup', 'Melbourne Cup 2005', 'Melbourne Cup Betting Odds' and a load of others all dropped significantly.

Does anyone know whats going on? I am reading MSN did an algorithmn update recently, but am concerned at why it would be so sudden. My pages are all 100% web standards with high quality SEO and unique content updated daily applied to them, plenty of quality backlinks and all the rest.

The only thing I can think of what that I did put out quite a few 'mini' sites designed to push traffic to my main site - however these are all unique sites with unique content and all the SEO work/standards I mentioned above.

Something that also crosses my mind is that the official site of the Melbourne Cup has been on a rampage the last few weeks, trying to buy up other peoples domains and basically using bully tactics - although it seems unlikely they would/could have anything to do with it correct?

Any help is appreciated.

Yeah, I'm actually having the same problem. One of my sites is dedicated to online poker, which is a fairly competitive topic, and I was ranking #1 for a good 3 months.
This week I checked again and I'm not in MSN's rankings anymore.

I would have thought that somebody had filed a false spam report against my site that had been accepted, but then I realized that I am ranking high on MSN for many other terms and phrases.

So I think we should give it a week or so and see how things are then.

Whenever Yahoo is going through an algorithim change or whatever, my rankings get dropped and then return in a few days.

I'm hoping that this is what's going on with MSN, too.

Im having a problem too, with only one of my sites though. I do all of my own optimizatio, no using any tools. I know that the site is the most relevant for the search so I'm hoping that things will clear up in a few days.

I am having the same problem. My site is 2 months old and I was surprised at how well it was doing for some competitive keywords. I quickly climbed to the top 20 for some and got the top position for others, which shocked me but i was happy. I was getting a handful of visits from msn searches, increasing day by day, and then it all dried up. so now the only one who visits my site is me and i'm so dissapointed...I looked at my serps today and I've taken a further tumble from the 29th when i noticed i fell 50-60 places for most keywords, now 3 days later half of those have been dropped and the others have dropped further.

Has there been an algo change? is msn stopping new sites from ranking decently too? Last week I installed a blogger blog on my site. Could this have been a negative factor? (but I dont see why)

Same problem out here with 3 of my websites. I was on first page now can't find no page in first 15 pages. If its an update it sucks as I see alot of spam ranking better...

I went from page 1 to page 2 on Thursday, while I was looking at the SERPs! And we are well below a stale little blog that hasn't had an input/change since March.
I think part of the problem may be that they don't have anywhere near as many search results as the other SE's and they are increasing that, which tends to push everyone down.
That doesn't explain that stale blog, though -- they must have some problems with their algorithm.

Well my rankings are slowly but surely coming back upto the top of the SERPS. About half have been put back to where they were and I am sure the rest will follow.

Here's to more good times with MSN