How to remove your competitors from MSN Live!

Published November 4th, 2006 in SEO.
With the full release of MSN Live last month many new flaws have been found in MSN’s new ranking algorithm. If you have been a long time reader of my blog you probably remember when I recommend using BlogSpot to spam MSN, and then just weeks later I showed you how one could take out the top 9 spots on MSN for just about any keyword.

Today I’m going to show you something even more viscous then I have ever written about!

In this post I’m going to be revealing a flaw in MSN’s new anti-spam algorithm that will remove just about any website out of their index, as well as how to combat this attack, at least until MSN fix’s it’s algorithm.

Before I get started you will need to familiarize yourself with a couple tools, and header responses codes that are common with how websites respond to request.

One of the tools you will need to use to check if a website is vulnerable to your attack is a HTTP Status Codes Checker. At this point you need to have a understanding of what type of header responses websites are capable of returning and what are the meaning of them.

The 4 types of response codes that you will want to keep an eye out for are 200, 404, 302, and 301 as they will quickly tell you how the website responded to the request. For our attack to work, you will want to find websites that return the 200 OK response after you have done your attack.

The 200 response for newbie’s mean that the website was able to process your request and successfully return the content that you have requested.

One of the big things that all SEO professionals know is that you should never have dupe content. Otherwise your website will be hit with a large ranking penalty or will be removed completely from the search engine’s index.

For this attack to work you have to somehow get your competition to make a bunch of duplicate pages on their domain… Good luck right?

It’s really not that hard, you don’t even have to ask them to dupe all their pages as you can do it for them!

All search engines see any URL on a site as a unique URL. Matter of fact they also see any GET URL as a unique URL (ie somedomain.com/index.html?test=test).

This is where we can take advantage of MSN’s crappy algo, and remove our competitors or at minimum hurt their ranking!

Go to your competitors website, then up in your address bar add an extra little bit to the URL. Something like ?test=12334, or ?remove=bye-bye. It can be anything you want it to be as long as it’s a _GET URL that the search engines can read and is unique each time.

If all goes well, your competitor’s website will show the same page that you had seen before you had put in the extra info in the URL. Once that has happen grab the new URL and take it to your favorite header checker and see if the website returns a 200 OK status, if it does keep that URL for later.

If you competitors website does return a status 200 when you add a GET vars to the end of their domain name, all you have to do is keep changing the string that you posted to your competitors website and keep them in a text file for later.

Once you have made a couple hundred new URL’s on your competitor’s website on the index or on every page of the domain you will then need to add all the new URL’s to a website where MSN will be able to find them and index them.

Once MSN has managed to find the new URL’s it will start to index the site’s content. Unfortunately for your competitor; MSN’s anti-spam algo is so bad that its does not have the brains to just not count the new URL’s because of dupe content, but instead just removes the page or entire website from it’s index.

Does this work? Hell yeah, because I just finished cleaning up after some ass-hat that did it to me and got my entire website removed from MSN Live!

Now for the good part; how to fix it!

If this has been done to you, I pray that you have PHP pages, because otherwise you’re going to have to convert your entire HTML based website to PHP because it is the only way I have found to write my own MSN patch for such an attack.

In all your headers of the pages that have been attacked you will need to add the following code as well as change the part with yourdomain.com to be the page all users should be at.

The above code tells the search engines that the fake GET post URL has moved to a new location, and because of this MSN will remove the content from their index as you have told them the new location of the page and they removed the old page(s) because of that.

Closing thoughts

This type of hack is very bad for our industry and I hope MSN will take quick steps to fix this ASAP, because I know many people will quickly go out and start removing their competition with this hack as soon as they can.

If you want to know why I posted it, read the above!