I'm getting a ton of hits from IP 65.55.* that appear to be coming from user searches such as referer "http://www.bing.com/search?q=copper" and user agents similar to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)".
It's not a problem but I found it curious because I can go to Bing myself and enter the same searches and I don't see my website show up. Is this a spider or some sort of human effort? The queries all seem to be related to the product pages they are pulling but the queries are typically single words which isn't the usual pattern I see from human users. This IP range appears related to Bing when I look it up.
Hi,
We are rolling out a new spider, so it is possible that might be causing your activity increase. If this is becoming more of a problem, please send me a mail at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and "single word query complaint" in the subject line and I will investigate.
Thanks,
~B
*I no longer work for Bing.
I'm still getting a lot of these. It's making Bing show up as a lot more active in my logs than it really is.
There is a new bot being rolled out by bing as mentioned in this article http://searchengineland.com/bing-to-ramp-up-msnbot-2s-workload-22705 but it sounds a little different from what you have been noticing.
I'm not worried about the traffic so much as the fact that it's not reporting itself as a spider. That seems like bad behavior and is causing my logs to misidentify the spiders as real traffic from Bing. It appears that two thirds of my traffic that reports as being referred from Bing is actually a Bing spider.
Same problem here. The code I wrote myself is noticing 100s of "referrals" from Bing. My client also has Open tracker running and this filtered them. This isn't some sort of publicity stunt is it?
Brett,
Isn't this the same issue as is being discussed in the thread "fake referrer from bing" or am I somehow confusing two different issues? If it is the same, it seems like an issue that has been going on for years, not a matter of your new bot.
In any case, I and apparently quite a few other people are seeing the same behavior, repeated one-word bing search queries from the 65.55.* ip address space that do not identify themselves with the msnbot User-Agent and that fake a referrer link that makes it look like it is the result of someone clicking on a Bing search result. It is a problem because of the large number of such queries throwing off the web site statistics, not to mention the relatively high bandwidth it costs if it is on a low volume site.
I don't see why you need an email from everyone who is experiencing this when it is so common.
Since crawlers are supposed to identify themselves as such in the User-Agent field and not fake the referers, wouldn't an easy solution be to stop violating accepted standards in a way that messes up web site statistics and happens to make Bing's stats look better?
Please provide some rational explanation as to why Microsoft is doing this and why it hasn't been fixed since at least 2007, the oldest post I have found so far complaining about this problem. Saying "it must be the new bot" and saying yet again "I'll ask the crawler team" doesn't answer the years-old question.
very interesting to read this although it hasn't happened to my manchester hotels website.
Hotels in UK
yeah i also found bad behavior and is causing my logs to misidentify the spiders as real traffic from Bing.... and my site www.tergent.us didnt yet index in bing
i will try to contact him
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