A WebmasterWorld thread and an older Bing Forums thread has discussion from webmasters over the issue of Microsoft Bing's web crawler, MSNBot, crawling file names that do not exist on a specific site.
This reminders me of the ongoing issue of Bing creating fake referrals in webmaster log files. This has been going on for years, where Microsoft claims they have fixed it, but never really has.
In this specific case, it seems like Bing is creating file names on a specific site to crawl. Wel, they are not creating files, just trying to fetch pages that do not and never have existed on a specific site. I am not sure if this is a Bing issue or a webmaster issue.
A long time WebmasterWorld member explained the issue:
In what is apparently a rather old bad behavior, msnbot has a practice of regularly requesting totally manufactured URIs that appear to be designed to trigger 404 errors. Here are two sample log entries of the two styles of bogus URIs msnbot requests:'65.55.207.126'¦Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:39:49 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/ADBF3C7AB534E8356F30D8AC05291640_00000.temp019f.html'¦'' '65.55.207.28'¦Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:46:22 -0500¦'msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)'¦'*/*'¦'/000166709_00001.temp00be.html'¦''
The requests ALWAYS take on one of the formats above starting with either a 32byte GUID or a nine digit integer.
In the Bing thread, another person said:
For many many years, msnbot has been crawling my sites looking for files that have never existed... i'm trying to figure out why... the filenames have changed slightly in recent times but they have been similar in structure since the beginning... they are something like 000092601_00002.temp0001.htm... in other words, 9 numbers underscore 5 numbers dot temp 4 numbers dot htm... the search for these is all over my server's directory tree...I'll emphasize once more that these files have never existed on my site and i have no clue how msnbot may have picked them up...
Honestly, I feel bad that I am always beating up on Microsoft. I know they are new to the game, when you compare them to Google. But I have to report these issues.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Bing Forums.
