search.live

[cw1865]

Just looking through some logs seem to be noticing a search live spike in my referrers. Anybody seeing anything unusual in this regard. I am seeing numbers on some sites that exceed yahoo (but less than google), but some are showing numbers bigger than google.....regular msn.com numbers are normal....weird result, curious if anybody is seeing the same.

[WebboTs]

This started last year:
Live Search's Spam Fake Referrals Were Cloaking Tests, Says Microsoft

[Akashic]

yep .. we're getting the same

but at the same time when I watch what is happening in our live help, where I can see who is in our shop and where they have come from, and what they are looking at (I feel like a voyeur at times), a lot more of them are coming straight from live searches.

[gwhite]

I had a single day where a single search term had more hits from live than they had given me to this point the entire year for all search terms. Next day everything is back to status quo.

[proffi]

Been experiencing the same with my blog Optimize Your Web: Optimizing and Internet Marketing search engines and people. Seam to be nearly random one word search phrases and when I test I can't find my site as a result on the top 100 for most of the phrases. I posted an article on this some weeks back Microsoft counts for 50% of my blogs visits | Optimize Your Web and another back in June Is Microsoft testing Live Search? | Optimize Your Web on this topic.

I have used Indextools quite well to monitor the organizations coming in and Microsoft.com has a big portion.

Might also want to point out Mel Carson's post on the topic Microsoft Opens Search Technology Centre In Europe | Mel Carson - Internet Marketing Blog - Microsoft - Memoirs

[cw1865]

My traffic data is being skewed and it makes it more difficult to analyze. Its like being on a diet and being given 10 different scales to weigh yourself, but each is off by a different amount any day! On each site I have to remove the 'live' data on the basis that its just 'not real' to get to the 'core' numbers.

[nkycomputers]

What better way to steal traffic?

Websites have been doing this for years. Spam you with a fake keyword link.... then you visit them thinking there was something real. Is MSN above this? It sounds to me like a "great way" to increase traffic to the Live site without any real investment.

[onlinetv]

My live.com and msn.com searches are always double to 4 times what I get from Google.

[wige]

I noticed on my site a surge in traffic with a live search referrer, where the initial searches had a very generic term, and subsequent searches were closer and closer to the topic of my site. After testing extensively, I determined it was some type of bot, but that was as far as I could get.

I would suggest checking the IP addresses of the incoming requests, look for traffic coming from the same class C (1.2.3.x) addresses. Once you find the class C block they are using, you can block them through .htaccess. Of course, if this is an MSN bot, it is unknown what effect blocking this traffic might cause on your rankings in MSN.