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Microsoft has finally officially commented on the fake traffic they’ve been sending to websites recently.

Recently I commented about how Microsoft Live Search has been stuffing our log files with bot traffic pretending to be human.

Basically they say, “we’ve been doing bad stuff for the last EIGHT months that screws up your metrics and disregards internet respect standards, but it’s OK, because we are going to stop soon.”

If anything, their statements strengthens my mistrust.

At least now I know how far back I can’t trust any traffic from MSN. They offer no solutions for how to scrub our log files (which I’ve already spent time trying to do myself.)

Maybe the real problem is one of scale. Google and Yahoo probably do this too, but it’s different. Google and Yahoo (to a lesser extend) send real traffic volumes. Any stuff like this that Google and Yahoo do ends up being noise that is not noticed.

With MSN…these queries are more than just noise; it can end up being the bulk of MSN traffic coming in. In one case, the bogus queries continually use a keyword phrase that I am trying to optimize for and measure results around.

The only reason I even noticed this problem is I saw a large spike in traffic to that phrase, but could not figure out any ranking change driving the increase. The bogus Microsoft traffic was enough to cut through the Yahoo and Google traffic for that phrase, and lead me down the path to discovering this problem.

At least Microsoft has commented. They have not apologized or offered any solutions. In my mind they’ve only gone as far as saying they are playing dirty pool (but plan to stop soon!) The damage is done. I’ve said my piece. What are you thoughts on the matter?

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