Microsoft Live Search: Quality Control or Spam?

Published: November 14, 2007, 12:49 pm

An alleged “quality check” from Microsoft Live Search is generating an abundance of negative criticism from webmasters across the Internet. Beginning in August, a handful of webmasters questioned the increase of spam containing irrelevant, and often bizarre, referral strings. Microsoft’s initial explanation on a Webmaster World forum appeared courtesy of msndude, who stated the following: The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your concerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index. Not being included in the Live Search index, however, may be a threat worth ignoring. For example, bloggers at ekstreme.com and blogSci.com noticed a influx of referrals with the same generic User Agent - Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR

[ Full article ]

Blog link

Comments