MSN Live Banning Reciprocal Link Exchange Spam

The headline above may be a bit premature as the claimed email received from MSN search team by a SearchEngineWatch forums member has not been acknowledged as coming from Microsoft. A quote:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you've removed these links and we will reevaluate. Live Search

Although that member posted a legitimate looking email header when asked about it, there is nearly no limit to spammers creativity when it comes to spoofing. But if that SEW forum member is indeed banned from the MSN Live Search results, it would appear to be legitimate. I've said for years that Link Exchanges and Reciprocal Links are crap and a waste of time and energy - it is nice to see that my unpopular opinion may be vindicated by this move from MSN Live Search. Here are a few of my previous rants against Reciprocal Links:

• Don't be a Reciprocal Linking Turkey
• Reciprocal Linking is DEAD!
• Buying Links from PageRank Pushers for Short Term High
Bookmark Murdok: Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at

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