Why does MSN love Blogger and Wordpress?

Well I really don't know. I have heard this a million times from Greg Boser and Shoemoney on MSN's love for Blogger. What does MSN see in it might give clues on how to out rank them.

Just the whole of January, blogspot.com accounts started dropping and non-free accounts/domains started going up, and today, a bunch of blogspot.com once again dominate the first page on MSN/Live search for the keyphrase Ituloy Angsulong. Where my entry has rose to as high as number 3, in the past and now it drops far from the first page. Which has already happened before I was able to get back, but this brings about a lot of questions.

Is the drop of my page in MSN/Live due to:

1. It triggered a ranking filter due to some change I did?
   My analysis: Yes I did some drastic change, which I am not willing to disclose.
   


2. MSN/Live is undergoing a recalculation/reindexing of the pages?
   My analysis: Something like this happened before, First entries in the Ituloy Angsulong SEO Contest were not free sites. After probably a month, free accounts started to dominate the first page. Then they slowly moved out and now they are all back. If they are slowly going to move out again, will there be enough time for February 23?
   


3. It still prioritizes sites like Blogspot and Wordpress due to some arbitrary designation of trust/authority?
   My analysis: Maybe, just because it is blogspot.com or wordpress.com it goes up. Just look at mitolynx.wordpress.com. Totally unrelated content. It's ranking based on links. Content is all gone as the site was banned on Wordpress.com. Why does MSN still treat it highly, currently at the number 2 spot.
   


4. It still prioritizes sites like Blogspot and Wordpress that are on subdomains because the main domain has several inbound links?
   My Analysis: Blogger and Wordpress.com are pretty popular. And many people link to it. So this could be the issue.
   

Based on what I listed, what among these do I think is the real reason behind it? I am giving lesser weight to number 4. Simply because people using using Blogger, refer to it as blogger.com and not blogpot.com. Links to blogger.com are 8.6 million, links to blogspot.com are 50,800. Links to Wordpress.com are 2.8 million. Aside from all the links, I have a feeling it is just the trust of authority from these sites. Either way, if it is number 3 or 4, I pretty have nothing much to fix it.

Thus I need to look at number 1 and 2. I did a drastic change to my Ituloy Angsulong website. Sometimes drastic changes really pulls websites down momentarily, and then as search engines recalculate everything, it slowly moves into place where it supposed to be. The problem is the time factor of the SEO contest ending on February 23, 2007, will there be enough time? And the drastic change I have done, will either give my website a lower or higher rank, and sometimes it takes a few days to see the trend on what is happening. If there is a slow downward trend, maybe it would be better revert the changes where there is still some time. But if there is an upward trend, might as well leave it as it is and wait up to where it floats and stops when going upward.

But is there enough time just to observe the trend? Considering February 23, 2007 is just a few days from now, and there is tons of work to be done, we can barely monitor anything. Well I guess we just have to wait and see.