The Live Search blog posted a comprehensive guide on how to determine if your site is penalized in Live Search and if so, what actions you can take to remedy the issue. I’ll highlight some of the key points in this excellent blog post.

• Microsoft said, “most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened.”
• First confirm your site is penalized by validating your site at Live Search Webmaster Tools and then clicking on the Summary tool and then the Site status section. Blocked “Yes” means you are penalized.
• Figure out what you did wrong by using the various tools to see your crawl issues, malware issues, link issue or something else.
• Microsoft then explains various reasons why a “good guy” can be penalized.
• Once you fix the issue then go to this form and fill it out, plus select the “Content Inclusion Request” option and submit. I do wonder why the form is not also built into Webmaster Tools.

For more details, see the Live Search blog post.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Spamming

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz