MSN Live Sending Odd Referrals -- QBHP -- to Websites

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:51 am 6 by
Filed Under Bing Search

Six months ago, we reported that Microsoft Live Search was sending spammy types of referrals. Rogerd reports on WebmasterWorld that he's not seeing the same types of referrals we reported back in January, but he's finding some even stranger ones. For example, he saw a search for "computers" and this is a term he doesn't even rank for.

Other forum members report similar suspicious activity. As robzilla says, all hits have a referring URL that includes the variable "form=QBHP". After analyzing his logs, he says that the user agent is consistent across the board: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)".

Is this another spam or quality check? We've yet to find out.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

 

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