Microsoft Azure

Bing Driven?

[RedBar]

I am most probably years behind about this however this year I have seen considerably more website visitors emanating from Microsoft Azure.

I don't use Azure, it's way in excess of my needs, and so far searching for information hasn't given me any clues therefore does Azure have a search facility?

Do I assume it's powered by Bing since all I get is "no referring link".

In fact, are these genuine visitors or a bot?

[keyplyr]

Azure is not directly related to Bing Search. Yes they are both owned by Microsoft, but completely different divisions.

Azure is basically a server farm (hosting company.) They lease storage and front facing IP ranges to anyone for any reason similar to Amazon.

If you are receiving traffic from IP ranges assigned to Azure, there's a very high possibility it is bots, regardless of what the User Agent says.

I, and most site admins I know, block Azure ranges. Bing does not crawl from Azure ranges.

[RedBar]

there's a very high possibility it is bots

What could they be doing?

They don't download lots of pages, they are always single pages and usually minutes, or even hours, apart.

All are from Illinois using the same IP however some are Win Vista, some Win 7, that sounds like my office!

[keyplyr]

Data mining for any number of reasons. Sounds exactly like a bot switching UAs to go undetected. This is common. It wouldn't be humans coming from Azure.

Related:

Search Engine Spider & User Agent ID Forum [webmasterworld.com]

Server Farm IP Ranges [webmasterworld.com]

Blocking Methods [webmasterworld.com]