Search Engine Roundtable has reported that MSN Live is penalizing heavily for back-linking. The post says, “MSN has recently taken the forefront, carrying the standard for the other engines when it comes to banning or penalizing sites for linking practices, and being very specific about the reason in their communications with affected webmasters. This has caused a rush of posts at WebmasterWorld with members complaining of being penalized or banned due to what MSN terms as unacceptable linking practices- and claiming innocence. Is MSN throwing proverbial babies out with the bathwater?”

One Webmaster thread said on 15th January:

I was banned from MSN very unfairly , i am not into illegitimate affiliate network or link exchanges .. I sent a Email to webspam@microsoft.com but no replies , nothing done .. This is quite terrible i must say , for a professional Search engine like MSN to do such band mistakes ..

Another one intents:

It seems that if one site on a shared IP gets banned, then ALL SITES GETS BANNED!

Third one asserts:

In December, if I read my log files right, MSN changed their way of handling links, the quality of incoming links and if they are natural or not.
Sites that have been in an "illegitimate link exchange" were banned from MSN, and if you have more than one site on the same IP and/or own more than one site ALL sites were banned.