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!
02 Dec at 8:29 pm
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?
02 Dec at 9:20 pm
Search Engine Referral Puppies?
02 Dec at 9:56 pm
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.
02 Dec at 10:03 pm
Done it already, it was really annoying me. I’ve got a list of IPs and hostnames if you need them.
03 Dec at 2:16 am
I have them as well… it’s really annoying! I didn’t know it was spam, though! I’ll look into blocking it.
03 Dec at 3:36 am
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.
03 Dec at 5:13 am
@Dee: Are you implying there are people who actually use Live?
03 Dec at 6:15 am
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
03 Dec at 11:00 am
@Stephanie
Dude. Not even Microsoft uses Live.
03 Dec at 3:43 pm
Pffft, Live.com only holds a 6% market share anyway. Who needs them :P.
03 Dec at 6:15 pm
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!
03 Dec at 6:16 pm
Any of you who want to block Live.com should check out Dee’s snippet:
http://beta.void-star.net/2008/12/die-livecom/
03 Dec at 6:27 pm
Thanks for the info Jem :)