Dear LazyWeb (as Jamie Zawinski would say),
Every now and then, I get one-word search hits from MS's Live.com. Example:
It's always like this. Like some bot was going through a dictionary file and visiting every hit returned from each word. It's almost never in groups like this, usually only one or two at a time. I'm not even on the first page for these words. These are the only kinds of hits I get from search.live.com, and every other search engine comes in with normal searches, never with a single word (unless it's a very uncommon word).
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this and what does it mean. Is this an SEO study, or is it really how MSN indexes the web?
UPDATE: This is resolved, confirmed, and nailed to the wall. In fact, it is Microsoft generating fake referrer hits, and they are doing with it exactly what you think they're doing. Here's just one confirming report, even admitted by Microsoft. Since they act like the spamming assholes we all deal with every day, I will happily treat them like spamming assholes and block their domain.
No loss. I have never seen a legitimate hit from an MSN search, anyway.
8 feedbacks
Comments:
Hey, thanks! Interesting, relevant link!
They will go through the results and check for instance the titles, content and urls of the pages/sites they get to infer how MS's algorithm works.
That's Microsoft spamming thew Web. Gone on for a year.
Bill and Steve are the same ruthless criminals they have always been. They wants hits.
That's not how the referral strings work. Basically the referral URL contains the search term that the user has used. Here's an example using "search term" in Google:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=search+term
Most logfile analyzers will then extract the query "search term" from this for you.
