Weird traffic from search.live.com?

[samzach]

I have coded a incoming traffic recording program that simply stores the referring URL in it's raw form. Here is what I've been seeing for the past few weeks:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?...us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?...us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?...us&FORM=LIVSOP

There is no way my website can be found for those search terms And of course, when you click on this link and go to the search results, my website isn't there.

Any ideas how I'm getting these referral links? Maybe LIVE doesn't set the correct referral URL or maybe this is some kind of bot that uses Live Search links so it can be blocked?

[snowbird]

Any ideas how I'm getting these referral links?

Those are not from real people. That's the Live Bot spamming you like it has spammed so many others (inlcuding my sites).

[birdsq]

Originally Posted by snowbird

Those are not from real people. That's the Live Bot spamming you like it has spammed so many others (inlcuding my sites).

Why should they do so?

[samzach]

so whenever the live bot visits my pages, it leaves these traces?

[snowbird]

No. It is only a temporary problem (normally). Some claim it is Live's anti-cloaking technology trying to determine if your site is cloaking pages. Other's have different ideas. It should last around a week then disappear. Here's a link where others have complained...

http://ekstreme.com/thingsofsorts/bl...pammed-you-too

[mahmood]

Why do people call it spamming? It must have a legitimate and rational purpase.

[zee]

It is ridiculous! I am also getting the same kind of a problem! I also get hits from Yahoo bot with "used cars" as the search term and I rank no where on that keyword because quite simply, it's not my niche and my page is not at all optimized for that keyword. Any thoughts on this?

[samzach]

okay thanks for the info! rep added. i'm seeing these links for about a month now... hope they end now, they're messing up my stats!

[Sebastian]

That's plain referrer spam. They hope you'll click the links on your stats page. Also they're inflating search engine usage statistics and they can decrease AdSense CTR because the MS-spam-bot downloads *and* renders Google's ads. This bot can't detect (most) cloaking, hence it has nothing to do with quality control (or, if so, the method is flawed, but what do you expect from M$ ...).

[samzach]

Can you explain a bit more? I don't get it?

[Sebastian]

The msn bot leaving those weird referrers in your stats is bogus, doesn't obey robots.txt neither on your site nor on Google's AdSense servers, IOW it's a sneaky Web robots eating your bandwidth, hence worth blocking. The explanation from MSN on another forum is either weak or a plain lie. Here is more info (sarcastic, but provides all facts and links out to many sources explaining particular issues with the MSN spam bot very detailed):
http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/micr...search-engine/

[QuickFreeHost]

I am also getting this. I was abit confused at first. Now i am glad i found this post, and realize im not the only one getting this on ALL my blogs.

[KenYN]

I get them hitting about half a dozen trackback pages that are blocked by robots.txt.

Thanks for the info!

[samzach]

thanks for all the info. so i can block them using robots.txt?