I think M$ is trying to convince people that their live.search.com is sending you all kinds of visitors … and, of course, that means you should be advertising with them.

It’s possible that search.live.com is not only showing people the search hits BUT also visits (at least) some (large!) number of pages in that list.

E.G., when I look at the referrers for the last 3 days for one of our sites, I see entries like:
- 10 hits : http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=license
- 1 hit : http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=licenses
- 1 hit : http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=upgrades
- 7 hits : http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contacts
… and on and on.

So, if they’re hitting our pages for these kind of search terms, you can imagine that they’re hitting hundreds of thousands of pages — possibly for each person’s search.

That way it looks like there are “sooooo many people” visiting your site because they’ve used search.live.com … and, of course, that’d mean you really should be advertising with them.

When all this started, we suddenly saw referrals go from about 3% of the number of Google search referrals to more than the number of Google-search referrals … all within a few days. Analyzing the resulting traffic from these referrals makes it fairly obvious that they’re not real people visiting.

In the end, I just attribute this to the normal kind of business behavior that’s consistent for Microsoft. What sleazebags!

Seems to be the best explanation out there.

Note that the IP address is in the proximity of the MSN spiders. Each one of these requests looks like a complete hit from a normal browser - loads images, css, etc.

I’ve been watching this for a few weeks and what appears to be happening is that MSN is performing *full* page view for *each* keyword that is associated with the site, in such a way that the keyword looks like it’s in the top results. It’s been happening on my sites for a few weeks, though it’s winding down today.

I suspect the MSN is trying to clean up results by performing some kind of intelligent analysis of keyword referrals in a way that makes sure they are not being duped by SEO “tricks”.

That’s my theory anyway.

My stats show 85% of one of my customers’ web site traffic coming from livebot-65-55-214-156.search.live.com .

The steady increase in traffic fits the denial of service attack profile, albeit on a slow time frame, but the increase grows slowly yet surely for this one customer. And this is not bogus traffic — my server, which has 100 or so customers on it, has had it’s traffic double in the last few months, from 170 kilobits per second to 340 kilobits per second roughly.