MSN

Is Google Referrer Spamming Too Now?

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Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a section of her traffic logs that were showing some odd information. According to what was recorded there her brand new, as of yet unlinked-to website was ranking on the first page of Google for the single keyword, [free]. If she actually had managed to rank for that phrase it would be an amazing feat to say the least. The competition for that single word is enormous. Unsurprisingly, when performing that actual search her site is nowhere to be found. The site in question is barely one week old, and hasn’t even been launched yet.

What is surprising, to me anyways, is that it appears that the traffic is actually coming from a bot at Google… a bot that is cloaked, sending fake

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Quick Poll… Who Here Wants To Bing Jessica Biel?

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Today CNN wrote a piece about the “‘Most dangerous’ celebs to search for online”. The article discussed which celebrity searches that were most likely to lead to sites infected with spyware. It was an interesting enough story, but what caught my eye were the two opening sentences:

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.

Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with

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Google Senior Vice Pres Dumps $8.9 Million Of GOOG Stock

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Panic Button! Last month Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Senior Vice President, David Drummond, made a public statement about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, in which he characterized the move as one that rose “troubling questions”. A couple of weeks later, Google co-founder Sergey Brin echoed that sentiment, stating that he found elements of the potential union between Microsoft and Yahoo as “unnerving”. Less than 1 week after that, comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR) released its January 2008 qSearch paid click report, which demonstrated that from December 07 to January 08 Google had suffered a 7% drop in paid clicks, which are the bread and butter of the Google machine.

Later that same day, in what as far as I can tell was a widely unreported move, David Drummond dumped what amounted to at least $8,960,000 of his stock in the company.

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Microsoft Starts Covering Their Ass On Rogue Bot Intrusions

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A quick update to the Microsoft Rogue Bot Fiasco. It looks like now they have correctly DNS’d the IP range that they are sending these bogus requests from. Previously, all of the IP’s (which I first mentioned were all coming from the 65.55.165.* block) reverse DNS’d to names such as bl2sch1081901.phx.gbl. They have apparently changed this, so the IP’s are more readily identifiable as coming from Microsoft, reverse DNS’ing to the Live.com domain, eg. livebot-65-55-165-99.search.live.com.

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Microsoft Needs To Quit Fucking With My AdSense Scripts

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A few months back I discovered that I was being hit with massive amounts of referrer spam. It was a little odd, because the phrases weren’t made to look like I had links coming from some sleazy little viagra or porn site… no, these were made to look like I was ranking for all kinds of spammy phrases on MSN Search. This confused me, since historically referrer search only benefits the site that is made to look like the traffic is coming from. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to make it look like MSN was spamming my logs.

What never occurred to me, of course, was that my logs were actually being spammed by Microsoft itself. As it turns out, they were.

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