MSN Keyword Referrer Spam Continues, Distorting Analytics Everywhere

As mentioned in an earlier post, MSN Live Search is sending referrer spam. If you don’t know about it yet, read my previous article on it. The referrer spam is those highly competitive, one-word keywords that Live.com is supposedly referring to your Web site.

The referrer strings look like this:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=travel&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Notice that the keywords are generally one word and highly competitive and some of the keywords are porn-related.

I wish that A-list bloggers would pick this story up so that people would start to pay attention and get Microsoft to stop. (This blog doesn’t get enough traffic to spread the word by myself.) This referrer spam is distorting everyone’s logs, and making it look like Live.com gets more traffic than it really does.

I mentioned why I think it is referrer spam in this WebmasterWorld thread.

“MSNdude” said that the fake referrers were part of a “quality check”. What kind of quality check would require sending referrers to webmasters? There is no reason that a webmaster would have to see a keyword in the referrers for Microsoft to do a “quality check”.

I believe that they send referrer strings that match the content of the site to encourage webmaster to click through to the Live.com search pages in the hope that it will drive up Live.com’s traffic. I am guessing that they probably think it will cause more people to start using Live.com regularly.

Sending a fake referrer = referrer spam.