Suspicious one word queries at Live Search

[Marcia]

Stats show "hits" from MSN/Live Search for broad one word searches on little sites that couldn't possibly rank in the top 100/200 (maybe even 500 or 1K LOL) for those queries.

I believe they're scrapers harvesting for as many permutations as there are for phrases that include the word, to mix and match and ... well, you know the rest.

There must be some way that can be detected by MSN.

[sem4u]

Something to do with this maybe?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Marcia]

Well, they're not the usual "spam" related type word mentioned in that thread, and they're totally, 100% on topic for the sites. That's why I think they're scraping and diving in for hundreds of pages.

Plus, there are a ton of pages returned for the query when clicking on the link back to the queries (in the last 300 visitors in Cpanel). They're real searches with a lot of real results. So I don't know if it's related, the symptoms don't seem to be the same.

[sem4u]

OK yes, it does sound like scraping now to me.

When did you start to see it happening? Once I know the dates, I can start digging in my stats.

[Marcia]

As far back as I can remember, every single month.

AND scraped sites are being pumped out by the thousands, taking loads of people's sites/pages out of Google and no doubt Live Search also.