Why do I see so many MSNBot Spiders?

[Marvin Hlavac]

My 2 year old site used to get between 300 to 600 pages viewed by MSNBot Spiders daily. However, starting September 17th the number of page views by MSNBot Spiders jumped to between 2,500 and 3,000. It has been at this high level ever since (about 5 weeks now).

I never received much traffic from Microsoft's search engines, and it still is just a small percentage of my over all traffic.

Is there any explanation for this unusually high MSNBot Spider traffic?

[Marvin Hlavac]

... and why am I asking the above question? Well, this very minute I have 83 visitors on my site:

* 37 people
* 1 Yahoo! Slurp Spider
* 1 Google Spider
* 1 AskJeeves Spider
* 43 MSNBot Spiders

Why so many MSNBot Spiders?

[BillyS]

I noticed the same thing too this month. MSN was spidering our site very hard. Through the first 14 days of the month, they grabbed around 17,000 pages on a 1,400 page site.

[mcneely]

I'm wondering why Microsoft is using so many unidentified useragents ..