[Admin]

It's well known that Live.com and MSN.com (They cannot even sort their branding out) have been referrer spamming webmasters sites. It comes in the form of "hits" from Live which look similar to a search referral:

search.live.com/results.aspx?q=internet&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

However you won't rank for these generic words like "internet" in the above example, it's simply MSN aka Live.com creating fake hits or rather referrer spam. Their reason?

We want to explain what this is all about. The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your concerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addresses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

Please keep the feedback and thoughts coming as we will use this to help improve this process and make sure that it impacts your sites as little as possible.


thanks
- msndude

Posted on WebmasterWorld.com in 2007.

To break it down, the excuse they are giving is it's used to detect cloaking and they are running it on select pages and the process will be improved.

Bullshit!

All my sites get pounded by their referrer spam so there is nothing select about it, the process has not improved it's 2009 now and if anything it's gotten worse. As for the cloaking, it's a trivial process making a few lines of PHP to cloak MSN and not be detected by MSN/Live so the whole thing in pointless.

Select Pages huh:



That shows the latest list of referrers on the forums homepage (only i can see it) and as you can see the first entry contains 28 hits, which is from Live.com for the keyword "Wordpress".

Screenshot is about 10 hours worth, i deleted all legitimate referring domains for privacy.

How many times do you have to hammer the same page, with the same keyword to work out if it's cloaking? Relentlessly day in day out many hundreds of times daily, you just don't get it do you?

I gave them a break in the beginning, hoping their would sort out the nonsense but it hasn't happened my referrer list, stats, bandwidth all get hammered because of their incompetence and i'm SICK OF IT!

http://www.tareeinternet.com/robots.txt

MSN IS NOW BANNED

Not from just this site, but from every server i own encompassing approximately 500 websites and totalling 40 Million plus pages as a conservative estimate.

So the MSN/Live index today has shrunk 40+ Million pages, and for a struggling engine this is no good for them, the users of their service trying to find information on the web and no good for their share holders either.

This site has an Alexa rank somewhere around 40k, and several others i own have 20k to 50k ranks and frankly the traffic from Live/MSN is so insignificant it's not worth my bother putting up with it or wasting my bandwidth any longer. This site has ranked in the Top #10-20 results on Google for keywords such as "SEO" for about a year or so, same with MSN.com

However i'm that fed up with the referrer spam i'll happily shit can a Top 20 or even 10 rank for things like "SEO", "SEO Forum" etc on MSN which bring no traffic anyway.

Later today i'll setup a script to automatically Firewall anything coming from the MSN/Live properties to work in conjunction with robots.txt

I really hope when MSN purchased Live.com they also snagged Dead.com for the future.

Anyhow, the various MSN bots have hit my updated Robots.txt already and i'd say they were thinking...



Oh damn, i be banned!

[Admin]

Just a brief update, i decided i wouldn't Firewall them but rather just roll with the robots.txt block only and see how they obeyed it.

Well so far it's not looking good, a week later and i'm still getting pounded with referrer spam despite them hitting the robots.txt within a few hours of putting it in to place.

Every day i'm still seeing the usual dozens of hits for...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=wordpress

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=theme

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=internet

The list goes on, anyhow this is what's in my Robots.txt

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: msrbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: msnbot-products
Disallow: /

User-agent: msnbot-newsblogs
Disallow: /

User-agent: msnbot-media
Disallow: /

# End MSN the Referrer Spammers Block #

So before i mail my homies in the Redmond area a baseball bat, i will have to double check that's "all" the MSN/Live robot rules.

[jamesfoster]

good information.. I think this helps me now to make my site not beeing spamed by any of this yahoo and msns .. Thanks for the valuable post..

[JohnS0N]

They now (some days ago) renamed themselves again. Bing.com.

[madness222]

Thanks for the tips!

[Dan Schulz]

Originally Posted by JohnS0N

They now (some days ago) renamed themselves again. Bing.com.

Yep, and (as an industry expert who will rename nameless said to me) the freaking bastards (her words) are still doing it.

I'm tempted to find their bots' IP addresses and flat out BLOCK them.

Sweetfunny, got a list?

[zaizaices8]

When I was searching about Bing. I found this article here. In his article, he compares Google and Bing but I still vote for Google though.

[visual]

Is this really true ?

[Dan Schulz]

Unfortunately, yes.