Strange Referrer Activity

live

[confuscius]

I am getting thousands of hits where the items in my log show the referrer as follows;

http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=KEYWORD&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP

When I load the referred page then I am told that there are no results. Also there is no relationsfip between the keyword and the page requested. The Kkeywords are single words and seem to be mainly concerned with the normal spam areas.

I have scoured Live to try and find form 'LSVP', searched everywhere that I acn think of.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what the heck form LSVP is? Have the spammers foound another flaw? I am based in the UK.

Thanks in advance.

[edited by: engine at 10:30 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2007]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[pocketseo]

If Live weren't the default on many browsers, they'd have close to zero share of search.

They already are pretty close to zero... maybe 1% of traffic on my sites. There are usually just a couple dozen more hits from Live & MSN combined than from Ask.com.

I like this solution:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

[Chris_H]

Strange, but I'm now seeing the same referrer activity from Google too:

Referrer: [google.com...]
IP: 74.125.16.5 (Google Inc)

We don't feature in the SERPs whatsoever for "abc", so are Google now doing the same as MS for quality control / cloaking checks?

Seems to be checking various pages on our site, 2 or 3 per day.

Very strange. Glad we've got nothing to hide!

[Peter]

Live search seem to have started their tricks again, but this time from 65.55.109.xx and 65.55.110.xx - and now with ***plausible*** keywords for each page requested.

Almost 15 times the usual number of referrers from LIVE today, and almost all of them from these .phx.gbl addresses (with no graphics or style sheet requests). French site and server.

Peter.

65.55.109.xx - - [08/Jun/2008:09:56:36 +0200] "GET /aaa/bbb/ccc.html HTTP/1.0" 200 32784 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=procession&form=QBHP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

[Receptional Andy]

I'm also seeing an increase in these visits recently, and I'm frankly unimpressed. I can think of no acceptable reason for them to fake referrers in this way, and it is a real pain for statistics. I really don't like wasting my time having to filter visits from MS IP ranges every time I review someone's stats.

I'm also increasingly asked about Live's apparent increase in traffic. I'm at a loss as to what MS expect me to tell people.

[pocketseo]

How would Microsoft respond if someone used a script to throw off the stats on microsoft.com or msn.com?

Law has not caught up with technology. Companies don't have to respect directives not to hit their site with bots?

[mvandemar]

Live search seem to have started their tricks again, but this time from 65.55.109.xx and 65.55.110.xx

They are also coming in from 65.55.232.*

There is one major difference that I can see this time around. They are not processing or requesting AdSense scripts, so at least those stats are unaffected.

-Michael

[happymondays]

I have a website receiving 200 hits daily from the mentioned IP ranges.
Actually, a lot my sites are affected... These fake searches come with short phrases, one word mostly, easy to spot. What the heck is this?

[Romeo]

What the heck is this?

It is exactly, what it looks like:
annoying, rude, respectless, intrusive, ...(add your own)...

While MS talks about 'qualilty' checking, they enjoy the side effect that this fake traffic corrupts webserver log statistics and makes webmasters thinking they get 1% traffic from LIVE while in fact their real search market share would perhaps be somewhere betweeen 0.01 and 0.1% otherwise.

I'm also increasingly asked about Live's apparent increase in traffic. I'm at a loss as to what MS expect me to tell people.

Just tell the truth ... :-) so that the word gets spreaded.

Thanks for keeping this old thread running. It started about a year ago, and not much has changed. They apparently prefer to simply ignore this problem.

Kind regards,
R.

[happymondays]

Awesome.

In this case, can I send an email to MSN stating that they can stop bombarding my sites - I BELIEVE their market share is more than 1%. Just leave my logs alone, would you?

[pocketseo]

Maybe there should be a law against not respecting robots.txt directives.

This is a waste of bandwidth and it's corrupting business data/stats.

I blocked msnbot with robots.txt on one personal site as an experiment and it feels great. Traffic is higher than ever because Live search is relatively insignificant.

[Receptional Andy]

I blocked msnbot with robots.txt on one personal site as an experiment and it feels great. Traffic is higher than ever because Live search is relatively insignificant.

I'm no fan of this behaviour (will you stop please, MS? I'm tired of having to get analytics software reconfigured to stop counting this automated traffic!), but your logic is kind of flawed. There's no possibility that blocking Live search will increase your traffic ;)

[pocketseo]

I'm not saying that it increased my traffic. I meant that I blocked msnbot, with no noticable effect on my traffic. It's mostly Google, Yahoo and social media.

MSN/Live never sent much more traffic than Ask.com or AOL.com. Microsoft should be exposed by the media for what they are doing. I'd like to see media like NYT and Techcrunch pick up this story.

[koan]

This is getting highly annoying, what is the point of hammering a site for the same referring keyword, days in days out. This is the behavior of a SPAM BOT. What's wrong with you MSN? Your 1-2% of traffic comes at a very HIGH price! It's close to not being worth it!

Anyone sent messages to their abuse email addresses?

[Tekime]

This is more than just annoying - it's deceptive, disrespectful, shady and should be downright illegal. It's Microsoft in action. I would say I'm surprised to see it happening if I didn't know who was behind it. Law certainly has not caught up with the Internet, and even where it has caught up MS has a history of disregarding law and ethics in general when it is financially advantageous.

I could give a flying expletive if every single Web site I run is removed from MSN Live Search permanently, black list here you come...

[pocketseo]

Is hammering a website with bogus traffic illegal? Someone should look into it.