I’m noticing significant shifts in MSN search results today on most of my blogs. They must have just done some sort of update. I can’t see any discussion of this in forums however so it could be just on my domains.
Since its inception the results were artificially high (for example I ranked number 1 for some very popular search terms on some brand new blogs) – so I was expecting an adjustment – today it came.
Whilst its sad to lose a little traffic (it never sent a huge amount) because of it I’m also happy because it shows MSN are becoming more accurate with their rankings – my blogs didn’t deserve the position that they had this early in their life.
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Lucky you! This may sound like a daft question but do you think you benefited from that early boost? I’m thinking, even if a site turns up at the top of popular search results for a short period of time (assuming it’s fairly relevant, that is) then it will create the snowball effect required to get a site more visitors. You’ll likely have got a lot more people to your site early on, a proportion of whom liked it, bookmarked it, added it to their aggregators, etc. – than if you hadn’t got that boost.
you’re right Andy – in ranking for a few months as high as it did on MSN we secured at least a few regular readers and probably a few incoming links on most of those blogs which of course have a flow on effect.