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August 20, 2009

Microsoft Claims To Fix Fake Referrals or "Single Word Query" Complaint

Last night, Microsoft Bing representative, Brett Yount, said that they have rolled out a fix for the fake referrals or single word query issues people have been noticing. Brett said:

We released a fix last night that should take care of these issues. If you are still having problems, let me know and I will investigate.

I am just not confident that this is resolved for the long haul. Why? Well, history shows that this has been going on since 2007 and has popping up time and time again since.

Plus, I was hoping for an official explanation on what this issue was, and I have yet to see one.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.



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posted rustybrick in Microsoft MSN Search at August 20, 2009 8:31 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

I have no doubt that this is their attempt to crawl/scrape to determine if sites are cloaking. But it messes with sites' log files and they got caught doing so.

MS doesn't want to admit it, otherwise they'd have responded two years ago.

I doubt they have "fixed" this - but maybe they have determined a better way to hide their actions. I suspect we'll see this issue again soon.

 

Posted by TimDineen at August 22, 2009 01:03

They did not fix it. Webmasters are still reporting this problem.

 

Posted by smf at August 23, 2009 15:20

Hi,

Thanks to our webmaster community and followers we are happy to share an update to the referrer issue that you may have heard or read about recently. First of all, we’d like to express our sincere apologies that this referrer issue continued past the August 20th date when we explicitly stated that it was fixed. With the support of many webmasters' data, our crawling team was able to pinpoint the root cause and deploy a new fix to stop the referrer string in production. This fix has been verified in all of our production beds.

Thank you for your patience.

Brett Yount
Program Manager | Bing Webmaster Center
LG Consulting at Microsoft
Webmaster Forums | Webmaster Blog

 

Posted by Brett Yount at August 28, 2009 12:01

Well, the referrer is gone, but they are still spoofing user agent - there is no way that I believe that msnbot-65-55-165-35.search.msn.com has a user agent of Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2 ...
While it doesn't ruin the stats in quite the same way, it does still increase the number of 'real people' views unjustifiably.
MSN - you are quite welcome to come crawl. But don't lie like a telemarketing scammer. Say who you are when you knock on the door.

 

Posted by Lea de Groot at September 4, 2009 21:25

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