SEO Skeptic

How's that for a potboiler SEO headline?  It's nowhere near as egregious as it sounds, and I doubt whether anyone at the search engines would really claim that what the BBC is doing is "cloaking" in the malicious sense of the word, but technically speaking … well you be the judge.

I was looking at the BBC home page because I found a pointer to it as example of a <table>-less layout (which I favour for SEO purposes, and the code is magnificent).  So I turned my styles off to see how it looked.  After that I did a bit more investigation and this is what I found.
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While I (curiously) haven't seen anything surface yet in the blogosphere, there's every indication that Windows Live Search (MSN) has rolled out an algorithm update in the past few days.  I've seen radical ranking changes for the keywords and sites I track, and confirmed with at least one other senior SEO that this has been observed elsewhere.

I'm certainly not one (especially keeping in the spirit of SEO Skeptic) to make sweeping claims about what any alogrithm update has accomplished (it's been kind to the sites I work on, but it doesn't mean it's a "good" update).  At first blush it appears as though Live is giving a bit less credit to keyword use in domain names and URLs - which traditionally has always been problematically over-emphasized in Live's ranking criteria (how 1995, how Microsoft).
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