I'm no search engine master, nor do I watch my logs constantly, but sometimes I do like to go back through the last month or two of data and see where my visitors are coming from search engine wise. I believe doing so helps me see where my content is "helpful", where it is is weak, and sometimes it helps give me insight into the "mind of your average searcher" and gives me ideas on where to expand things... But while google sends many visitors with relevant searches (some with 3-5 word targeted phrases), it seems like many of the ones from search.live.com are... strange. Things like: "google", "default", "marketing", "trade", "privacy", "search" Now, some of these words, I have no doubt are included in my site's content *somewhere*, but none of them in any abundance, as none of them are really related to my content. And if I run searches for them through Live, my site is no-where listed in the results... I thought I had read someplace previously that these types of visits were actually live, doing some sort of testing/analysis from their side, but I thought if that was the case that it would die down over time. But looking, these visits have been ongoing for 6+ months now, and they're no more targeted today then they were when they started? Anybody seen this type of behavior before? Should I care, or do I just assume search.live.com is high on something and stop bothering to watch and see the results it's sending my way?
I have seen the same in my logs the last couple of months, and it is one of the msn search bots going by it's ip address.... probably checking that what the normal bot see's is the same as a user see's on the page.
Ahhh... looking closer at the logs it appears you are correct, most of these visits are coming from similar IP ranges that track back to msft. And when I double check using analytics, the visits in question don't appear at all (No javascript for the bot I guess.. that's fine)... of course, when I go via analytics, I realize just how little traffic live is sending me at all anyway (about 1/30th of what Google sends).. I guess I'll just ignore Live in that report for right now. Thanks vagrant!