Private domain registration.. negative affect on rankings?

Ok... here's my situation. Had a site getting about 400 uniques a day, almost all from MSN (90%). Last Friday I got a call at home late at night from someone in Syria and I couldn't quite understand anything he said. So, I ended up changing my domain to a private registration. The very next day all my traffic from MSN vanished! I mean... completely gone from being in the top to (and in some cases top 3) on some competetive keywords.

So, does anyone out there understand WHY or HOW this could happen? I waited until Tuesday and still the same results... so I cancelled my private registration hoping that would fix it. Well.. no luck as of yet. Still gone from MSN. Anyone out there have any idea what happened? I was set to launch another site on Monday but held off cause I also set that domain as private. Any info MUCH appreciated.


Avalon

Private domain registration shouldn't have anything at all to do with it.... Must have just been a coincidence....

Even IF private domain registration effected your search rankings, I highly doubt MSN would know about it in a few hours time, let alone change their algorithmic responce to your site within that time......

It was about 20 hours after the change. The timing of it is very odd though and pretty much has left me to wonder "how" and "why" it happened. I was making some good coin from Affiliate revenue and my rankings were very good. I look at the sites in the same niche now occupying my spots previously, and they are 100% garbage! I mean, at least half of the top-10 have no content and/or are designed for Adsense only. They also don't employ any SEO techniques nor do they have a lot of links. I dont get it.

I have plenty of domains with private registration that rank in the top 3 on msn.

Ok... don't know what happened then. Like I said, the timing was almost too coincidental. Is it possible the guy who called me could have purposely done something to kill my rankings? Don't know how he could... but weird that he called Friday night about me "Rankings" for the site being so high on MSN and the very next day (after I refused to talk about a biz proposal with him) the rankings 100% dropped off the charts. Very strange.

Did someone from MSN call you and your rankings then dropped? It could be that some of your competitors agreed to whatever was being proposed and reaped the benefit. Hopefully that was the case as opposed to penalizing you for not giving up some cash.

You might want to give MSN a call.

Like everyone said, your whois info has nothing to do with your website in any way shape or form.

your domain name whois as been changed, so maybe search engine thinks that someone buy this domain, i have the the same problem know when in moved from private registration to regular registration.

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The call wasn't from MSN but from someone in Syria. He was mentioned a biz proposal and I just told him "not interested" more than a few times. For one, I really couldn't understand him (accent) and secondly my site was doing quite well. Unfortunately, the site now has 0 indexed pages and about 90% of my profits have gone bye-bye because of MSN. Google gets me a few visitors a day... but MSN made up 90% of all my traffic. Frustrating. Oh, and someone in another thread posted this link to an article:

http://www.boogybonbon.com/2006/11/04/how-to-remove-your-competitors-from-msn-live/

I don't know if it really works or not... but if it does... OUCH! Anyone could essentially F-over the competition in a major way. Maybe that happened to me... don't know. It's all a guessing game for me really.