Dec 02 2008
Live.com Fake SERP Referrals Are Pissing Me Off
Melissa and I had a short chat about Live.com search results in our stats a while ago. Long story short, a whole bucketload of search result click-throughs were showing up in our hits that were either a) irrelevant to our sites or b) were bullshit, because we weren’t ranked for that term anyway. This wasn’t particularly bothering me at the time — although obviously annoying — so I left it at that.
However, with the launch of rev.iew.me I’m obviously keeping an eye on referrals, hits, SERPs etc. I want the site to do well for the benefit of the users, not just for me. This is becoming impossible with live.com sending a fake/spoofed SERP referral every hour. My search engine referrals a littered with crap so it’s hard to tell fact from fiction, and I can’t even begin to imagine how that’s having an affect on hit counts/etc. The bastard of it is, Microsoft admitted to the referrer/cloaking spam so it’s not even a bug (this is intended behaviour!)
I’m sorely tempted to start blocking the Live.com bot. Despite the fact that this would eradicate any possibility of ranking in Live — oh noes, what a shame — at least my blood pressure would return to a sane level!
Warning
This post is over 6 months old. This means that, despite my best intentions, it may no longer be accurate. Age, motherhood, experience, loss... these things have all changed me from when this blog was started back in the heady (ha) days of my youth.
As much as I would like to go back and edit 10 years of archives to provide an insight into the 'me' of now — to update coding snippets and revise website advice — it would probably take years to do so (by which point I'd have to start again!) This would defeat the point of keeping these archives anyway.
Please take these posts for what they are: a brief look into my past, my history, my journey.
13 Responses so far
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I’m getting them as well. Just random, one-word searches like “pretty”, “couple” and “night” popping up in my search referrals.
I might block the Live-bot also. Like I care about M$’s shitty search engine. Who seriously even uses it?
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Search Engine Referral Puppies?
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Ugh, how annoying. I would block it, but I’m kind of reckless when it comes to that kind of stuff, so don’t listen to me.
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Done it already, it was really annoying me. I’ve got a list of IPs and hostnames if you need them.
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I have them as well… it’s really annoying! I didn’t know it was spam, though! I’ll look into blocking it.
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SecFilterEngine On
SecFilterSelective HTTP_Referer "search\.live\.com"
Blocks the referrer, not the bot. :P
It’s not like anyone actually uses Live for real searches, anyway.
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@Dee: Are you implying there are people who actually use Live?
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Block! Block! Block! That’s stupid, I haven’t read the article yet but I shall. Are they just going to continue to do this? Isn’t that wrong or illegal? I am not really knowledgeable about SEO related things, forgiveth me. :P
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@Stephanie
Dude. Not even Microsoft uses Live. -
Pffft, Live.com only holds a 6% market share anyway. Who needs them :P.
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I have the same problem as Joe. It’s really getting on my nerves.. I think I will be blocking it as well, now that I know it’s a problem for other people too, and that MS isn’t going to do anything about it!
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Any of you who want to block Live.com should check out Dee’s snippet:
http://beta.void-star.net/2008/12/die-livecom/ -
Thanks for the info Jem :)
