This story broke in August but it’s heating up again because MSN is still up to something.

MSN has been referral spamming websites. This means they “ping” a site with a bot acting like a human and leaving a link in the referral logs back to MSN’s website.

Spammers do this hoping you will check your logs and follow the links back to their site where you will make a purchase, click an ad, etc. MSN claims this is a “quality check” but what kind of QC wreaks havoc on your primary competitor’s ad program?

Microsoft’s bots are triggering some javascript including the one used for Google Adsense. You may recall that the click through rate determines the quality (value per click) of ads placed on your sites. With MSN’s referral spamming they are racking up impressions but not clicks damaging your CTR and ultimately, income.

Michael has more on the damage caused to Adsense including Google’s own ostrich policy. It seems to me Google should be kicking and screaming over this. But, with thousands of gearhead doctorates, engineers and techs I guess the idea of a bot from MSN pretending to be a person doesn’t track for them.

This gets stranger as the hits from MSN look like legit search referrals, complete with keywords in the referral links left in the logs. If you check the keywords sending traffic though you may be disappointed as you won’t actually rank for them in the public search engines. You can learn more about checking your logs for real versus spammed hits at eKstreme.

Pierre is also asking for any victims of this odd behavior to shout out, like Reuben who has reported some oddities on his own site, and gives a good tutorial for reading referrer logs.

Donna reports that MSN has acknowledged this odd behavior and requests that webmasters not block their bots. It’s not happening on any of my sites, but if it were I’d be inclined to tell MS to shove off. They have plenty of resources to conduct any kinds of tests they like - without messing with my stats or potential income.

The original WMW thread is here, including msndude’s response.

So where does this leave us? It’s a mystery the Venture Brothers would love!

Here’s the speculation I’ve been able to come up with:

• Desperate for attention. With Google gaining market share all over the place, maybe they are desperate enough to spam… though it seems pretty early in the game to me.
• Demoralize Adsense. Why not? MS does have Adcenter which has not really been any competition to Google.
• Broken with bots gone Wild! Somebody flipped one too many switches and now MSN bots are taking over the internet.
• Testing a new algo. And why not? Yahoo just put one out and Google did that whole random PR stuff last month. MS needs to keep up!

The real pain about this is what Pierre pointed out: Microsoft could be “testing” on their own cached versions of websites but they aren’t. Instead they are creating low levels of confusion across the internet and messing with publisher’s Adsense stats. The only people that benefit from this is Microsoft. I sure hope it’s worth it.

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