MSN killed my site

I get approx 1600 unique visitors from Google/day. MSN has gone from sending me 800/day to 40/day. I'm not sure what is going on. These are the things I've done to try to get it back.

1) my URL's used to contain '~''s to separate keywords, now I'm using '/'
2) i added navigation pages that link forwards and backwards throughout my site
3) ???

Has MSN made some changes recently to ban sites for various things. I have a feeling there's something simple on my site that it doesn't like.

Any tips/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Chris.

When is the last time MSN did a full idexing of your site?
Deep Scan?

That's the odd part. MSN does a complete crawl of all 10,000 pages every 3 days.

1) Even though it crawls the pages every 3 days, do you know how often it indexes the pages it crawls?
2) do you know if MSN prefers a '/' in the url over a '~' in the url?
3) do you know if MSN is hip to white characters over a white background that are defined by a stylesheet stored in another file? I used a few characters at the bottom to simply repeat the page title and keywords within a header tag and it looks better invisible than visible. Goodl doesn't seem to mind these.

I think that the "~" can be associated to a free site/free space, so if it's true that SE penalize a little bit the free hosted site it can bet better to remouve that symbol from the url

Chris,
M is in constant state of flux. They keep tweaking the algo and you will experience sudden drops and rises in SERPs.

Thanks for the info. I never knew that the ~'s were used often by free sites. I used to have very funky pages names like viewproduct~~~AEM~~~Brakes.html. I previously used the '~' as a separator of fields. I changed those pages to be named using '/'s instead of '~'s and removed any blanks (e.g. buy/aem/brakes). I wonder if the blanks between the ~'s hurt my site ranking as well.

As of yesterday, MSN sucked up 29,900 pages. It probably did this because all of the page names are now different. It is not sending me any more traffic yet, however. How long does it typically take for MSN to rank a page after it crawls it?

Thanks for the help.
Chris.

MSN usually ranks pages faster than the other two biggies. But as it was stated earlier, their rankings bounce around quite a bit. You could be king of the world one day and on the second page the next.

I got killed on my 2 most important keywords for a week, I was off the top 10, and then back to #3, then back to #56, and all the way back to #2 within another week.

MSN Drives me nuts!

As for me.... MSN won't let me search anywhere anymore. I prefer MSN over others, but for the last 2 weeks I keep getting error messages. Friends say they can search with MSN, but I wonder how many are NOT able to search now. What ever the problem is... I wish I could find your website, I just can't with the current searching problem that has been inflicted upon me and my computer.

Kitten