Peppermint Tea

MSN Live Search Referrer SPAM

Posted 13 July 2008 in by Sam Brown - 5 Comments

Recently Microsoft’s Live Search has been causing some unnecessary and unwanted referrer SPAM in several of my Mint installs, this was confirmed recently by others in this Mint Forum thread.

I’m not 100% sure when it started, but I have been seeing referrers from search.live.com for some strange and very generic keywords, things like “article”, “design”, and “sites”. Visiting the referring URL returned no link back to any of my sites.

There is a solution

Visiting the Advanced Preferences in Mint (/mint/?preferences&advanced) allows you to stop recording activity from specified IP ranges, I have added the following to the list (that already includes an IP range that Shaun previously identified as a problem with MSN Search):

  • 65.55.109.*
  • 65.55.110.*
  • 65.55.232.*

I have to say I would love to know how and why MSN Live Search is doing this, I have hundreds of these records across my Mint installs. If you are worried about this problem yourself be sure to keep an eye on the Most Recent Searches tab and I would definitely recommend installing Secret Crush which will help you identify the referring IP.

Do let me know if you notice this problem yourself and if your IP ranges include anything different.

Cameron Hunt Says:

355 days ago #

I’ve been getting referral spam from Live as well. Searches for “cameron” seemingly from the first page, but never linked when I check. Same IP as the ones you listed.

(For others: to check if the IP addresses are the same use the Secret Crush pepper and search for “65.55.109.*”, etc. Secret Crush handles the asterisk wildcard properly.)

Thanks for the work-around.

 
Sam Brown Says:

355 days ago #

Searching for “65.55.*” in Secret Crush is not fun, all 18 rows (my maximum per pane) are filled with visits from MSN Live Search in the last 24 hours. Flickr.

 
Shaun Inman Says:

354 days ago #

I only have one appearance of an IP in the 65.55.* range (65.55.110.107 specifically) across all my Mint installations. I did some digging a while back as to the cause of or motivation for these referrers and turned up nothing. Let me know if you find anything.

 
Raj Says:

354 days ago #

Since last year one of my blogs, www.Insidewh.com, has consistently received SPAM referral from Live search. I still receive around 5-10 hits daily. When I had contacted Live support last year, I was told that they are doing this for quality’s sake and I should not block the IP addresses of their bots. They actually wanted to check for SPAM sites by doing all this useless stuff.

It’s safe to say, I guess, that Live search will someday shutdown their search engine. They don’t have a clue as to how to run their search engine.

 
Sam Brown Says:

353 days ago #

Interesting information Raj, however I think I will continue to ban their IP addresses, I get almost no referrers from search.live.com aside from their own bots/spiders/servers whatever it is that’s causing these unqiue visits.

 

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