MSN bot hitting 1000s of pages on my site

New to this forum. Is this just a test for MSN?

[jp_css]

MSN bot has been hitting my site on and off until now I have found that it has been indexing through over 1000 pages. Is MSN bot only an experiment for now, or is it something more?

[Imaster]

Its been hitting hard on my sites as well. In some cases, even higher than googlebot.

I believe it's an experimental project which they plan to launch few months down the line, which could easily postpone to much more time than that.

Useful Links:
MSN - MSNBot [search.msn.com]
Ballmer: MSN Search - Coming Next Year [webmasterworld.com]
Google Results for 'MSNBOT' on WW [google.com]

[uncle_bob]

I've got msnbot deep searching a new site within days of it going live. Googlebot it still just getting the startpage .

[pontifex]

This thing is much uglier behaving than G!
I just opened a trouble ticket with my provider, because MSNBOT hammered the machine to death.
For the next few hours 65.54.164.* is blocked!
P!

[jp_css]

Yeah, it was really hitting my site very quickly, but slowed down to a crawl now.

[MikeBeverley]

Anyone seen this guy:

msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

he has hit my server 28,411 times in the past 14 days. That's alot of server load but I don't want to ban him as I'd like my site included in the Microsoft search engine when it comes out. Anyone know how to slow him down?

[mars9820]

[search.msn.com...]

How often will MSNBot access a page from my web server?

In general MSNBot should not try to access your site more than once every few seconds. MSNBot will also account for the time it takes to download a page from a site so tht if your site has a slower connection we will not access it as frequently. If you find that we are placing too high a load on your site please let us know by sending us e-mail at [e-mail].

[erthlng]

Seeing similar high activity over the past week. About 12,000 pages a day getting crawled.

[Harry]

And it cost me 2.28 gig in one day and used up my allowed bandwidth for the month.

[dwilson]

Those having this problem ... are you using dynamically generated pages? with?id=####?

I wonder what similarities there are between sites w/ the difficulty. Perhaps something makes MSNBot think there are more pages than there are. Here's an idea ...

If page.asp?item=1234&last=5432 has a link to page.asp?item=8897&last=1234 etc. ... then a nearly infinite combination of URL's would exist.

Are your sites set up anything like that?

[Harry]

Except the message boards and the shopping cart, everything is plain html

[caine]

MSN is the biggest crawler in my logs at the moment - outdoing everyone together!

[helenp]

Today seems have stopped spidering that heavily,

[jasontromm]

I thought I had banned msnbot from my site, but it's come back.

I put the following lines in my robots.txt file:

User-agent: msnbot*
Disallow: *

And I even banned the IP address it seems to be coming from in my .htaccess file:

deny from 65.54.164.

What else can I do? It's hogging up my bandwidth and I don't care to be in Microsoft's directory. (I hate Microsoft in general) The majority of the world uses Google and people can find trommetter.com that way.

[Oliver341]

Old thread, just came across it...

I thought I had banned msnbot from my site, but it's come back.

I put the following lines in my robots.txt file:

User-agent: msnbot*
Disallow: *

Your syntax is all wrong.

Use:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

[Receptional]

Anyone know how to slow him down?

Absolutely - MSN built a special robots command "delay" into their msnbot for this purpose - launched in this very forum a couple of weeks ago :)

[webmasterworld.com...]

Dixon.