For over two years now, Microsoft’s search engine, has been struggling with a bug where fake referrers would show up in webmaster’s log files, generated by MSNBot. MSNBot is Microsoft’s spider, it has been with them since they first started crawling the web, and has seen the search engine named MSN Search, Microsoft Search, Live Search, potentially Kumo and now Bing – but MSNBot has continued to be consistent with two things throughout all the identity issues with the Microsoft search brand.
(1) MSNBot has never changed their name (yes, they added new bots, but those are named MSNBot 1.x or 2.x). (2) MSNBot has continued to cause a mess out of webmaster’s log files.
What webmasters see in their log files are lines that read www.bing.com/search?q=[fake+keyword(s)+goes+here]. Now, their websites typically do not rank for those keywords and do not even contain those keywords in their pages. Microsoft has admitted in the past, they have done this as a form of detecting cloaking. But more recently, Microsoft has been tight lipped about why they are generating these fake referrers in the log file, although recently admitting they are called “single word query” issues. Microsoft has told us time and time again, that they fixed the issue, but over two years later, webmasters are still complaining about the bug.
As I explained in my very strong worded post at the Search Engine Roundtable, I am honestly extremely upset and disappointed with this bug and others. Like I said, the bug has been an issue since mid-2007 and has been confusing and hurting webmasters time and time again, since then. Here is a listing of some of the blog posts on this specific referrer issue at the Search Engine Roundtable since 2007:
- Microsoft Bing Still Spamming Fake Referrers In Webmaster Log Files, August 25, 2009
- Microsoft Claims To Fix Fake Referrals or “Single Word Query” Complaint, August 20, 2009
- Bing Classifies Cloaking Detection as “Single Word Query” Issue, August 10, 2009
- More Cloaking Tests In Form Of Fake Referrers From Microsoft Bing?, August 5, 2009
- Microsoft Disables Fake Referral “Feature” Temporarily, April 29, 2009
- Microsoft To Fix Fake Referrer Data From Live Search, April 22, 2009
- MSN Live Sending Odd Referrals — QBHP — to Websites, July 24, 2008
- Microsoft Live Search Continues Referral Spam Tests With MSLIVSOP?, January 14, 2008
- Live Search’s Spam Fake Referrals Were Cloaking Tests, Says Microsoft, December 4, 2007
- Microsoft Live Search Spam-Like Referrals Are Still Occurring, November 19, 2007
- Microsoft Live Search’s Strange Spam-Like Referrals Are Official Tests, September 6, 2007
- Weird Referrals From Microsoft’s Live Search?, August 17, 2007
I informed Microsoft that I will be writing about this issue on Search Engine Land and they did send me this statement:
Apologies for the delay. Regarding the fake referrers issue, the webmaster team noticed glitches in the system which were resolved on August 20th. If webmasters continue to see issues post this date, we encourage direct feedback to bwmc@microsoft.com or via the webmaster forums at: http://www.bing.com/community/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=11.
But honestly, this is not good enough. Like the title of this blog post says, “what part of stop don’t they understand?”
Credits to: Barry Schwartz
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