MSN Demotes Spam?

MSN Dude had this to say regarding the latest “update” and “spammy looking pages being removed” from the index.

No one is talking about a “total ban” here — just some recent changes that tend to demote (but not remove) “spammy-looking” pages. If your site has disappeared completely, it’s not because of any recent update of ours. There is a blacklist, of course, but that process hasn’t changed lately. If you think your site has been blacklisted, send e-mail to webspam@microsoft.com. Be sure to do a “url:” query first though — just to make sure your page really is gone.

From the testing that we can see, there hasn’t been a ban of all “spammy looking pages” so this tends to be more of a manual removal than an filter being in place. If your site has been hit, do the URL query to ensure that the page is gone. Example: url:domain.com/page.html. It works whether or not you put in the “www” or “http”.