So back in mid-November MSN launched their own Webmaster Center Blog. As with the Google Blog this should provide a peek into some of the inner workings of the their own team of Engineer/PR/Evangelicals as they parade new MSNbot nuances to the throngs of awaiting enthusiasts. After sniffing around the blogroll today I noticed that one particular items was just put to bed. Having threatened to post about this ages ago, my procrastinating ways have lead me to the end of the saga without having weighed in until now.

The ‘Question’ related to the rash of bizarre search referrals that MSN was spreading around earlier this year.

The question was pretty much ‘where the heck is all of this search traffic coming from suddenly?’. Okay, suddenly meaning towards the end of August of this year, just like everyone else. So for an SEO Firm getting hits for the keyword ’search’, this could appear pretty flattering. Did I do something magical to suddenly send the MSNLive Bot into heat? Did someone hijack a PPC campain and we’re going to get a nasty bill from the folks at MSN Adcenter? After playing with those ideas for three to four seconds, it became brutally obvious that this was just bogus bot traffic masking itself with a search referral, thus triggering an entry into our Search Metrics. If I didn’t know any better I could possibly call that cloaking… The plot thickens. After spending some time reflecting on our Enquisite data a few items still didn’t ad up.

1. Enquisite was tagging this traffic as arriving from MSN Live. No one could recreate a human click from this engine using ’search’.
2. It was always the same keyword.
3. The same keyword hit dozens of alternate URL’s. One would think that specific traffic, though not very focused, would generally arrive at a single related page. (same phrase, same search engine)

The geo tagging was returning an ‘unresolved’ so I grabbed the raw logs and compared the referring strings. Here are the bits that matter.

• 65.55.165.51 (Ip of the ’searcher’)
• http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP (Appears to be the referring SERP)
• http://www.metamend.com/what-is-cloaking.html (Target of ’search result’ – Irony?)

This is one of many examples. All were from the same Class A IP block. Have a look for yourself ARIN – 65.55.165.13. So if you caught the Owner there everything would quickly ad up. So then the question becomes “Why is MSN hammering my site with bogus search referrals which are completely skewing my metrics tools and tracking systems. As you can see from the screen above, we are still receiving traffic at time of writing.

Once I found the SERP string I started searching for other victims online and came across several informative posts including this rather enjoyable Post with an equally thoughtful title.

Early this month (I did mention how late I am getting to this right?) MSN posted on it’s brand new Live Search Webmaster Center Blog about this whole topic. They’ve done a pretty lousy job of responding to this epidemic of bad traffic, but hopefully it will result in some warfare in the SE marketshare. Anyhow all paths on this topic, up until the MSN post, ended at this discussion at Webmaster World. They’ve stated that these issues should be disappearing however we’re still seeing the traffic 2 weeks after their announcement so we’ll see how that goes.

Later.