Is Microsoft Spoofing Blog Visits To Generate Traffic Back To Bing?
I just checked my blogs’ stats ( I use the Wordpress Firestat plugin ), and found a couple of very interesting ‘visits’ - visitors apparently coming from searches of ’Twtitter’ and ‘Technology’ on search.live.com, which is Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. That was somewhat suspicious - my blog is only about 2 weeks old. The chances of my blog appearing in top results for these two search terms is close to zero.
Here’s the screenshot of the two visits, who’s source are the keywords : ‘Twitter’ and ‘Technology’, from Bing search engine:
I tried to find out who are the visitors who were referred to my blog from Bing. I was surprised to find that they came from within Microsoft Corp network!! ( I used MaxMind IP geocoding services to find details of IP address 65.55.165.102, which is one of the visitors’ IP).
See screenshot below:
As far as I’m concerned, there are two possibilities here:
1.A real person working for Microsoft searched Bing for ‘Twitter’ and ‘Technology’, and my blog appeared high enough in the search results, and that visitor click on my link from Bing.
2. A robot identified my site as a blog (perhaps as a technology blog), and generated a spoof visit, knowing I will look through my stats (what bloggers do several times a day), and then follow the link that apparently brought a visitor, thus generating a Bing hit. Spoofing this kind of visit is pretty simple (you can pragmatically generate an HTTP request and set HTTP_Referrer to whatever you want). As a matter of fact, I get several such spoofed visit to all of my blogs, but I never got one from a major website.
Keep in mind that there are millions of bloggers out there checking their stats to see who visited their website and where did they come from. If you can get only half of them to click on a spoof visit to check the visits’ referrer, you can generate a considerable amount of traffic.
So which is it, a real visit or a spoof? You decide for yourselves, but just try to search on Bing for Twitter or technology and see if you get a result from this blog (Solar OverPower). It might be that Microsoft is loosing it.
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This is a spoof.
You are spot on. Less than 7% of the Bing referred traffic during July was not from a MS IP number on my obscure website. The single search word in the supposed referral was typically something my site didn’t hit the top 50 sites on…
Apart from the above clue there are some obvious bot signs about this traffic:
- no cookie is ever set
- single word search phrase
- 65.55.* IP adresses
- fires of Javascript call for web analytics systems as well
This makes up a lot for the Bing claim for increased search percentage.
I found some suspicious ip’s in my blogs visitors, but in this case after doing who is? search I found that the email contact for some of those ips was abuse@something… some visits toke more than 7 minutes (so I guess someone was watching the video on that post…) I see all kind of spam on twitter so I think thats why that kind of ip visits my blog… I dont really know :O( its a mistery but a good topic for bloggers to talk about