« Return to all random blog posts

search.live.com/results.aspx referral spamming

im getting lots of these across a whole bunch of apache log files:

Referrer: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=keyword&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
IP Address: 65.55.165.88
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

After some googling it seems this is part of some live.com's search engine quality checking ? basically spoofing a real browser getting referred to my site by some very very random keywords (that do not exist anywhere on my site)

lots of people are finding these in their logs.. someone even said the bots download/parse javascript and css files... who knows what this could be doing to things like adwords or google analytics.

So I just blocked them:

if(preg_match('/^65.55.165/',$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])){
        header("Location: http://microsoft.com");
        exit;
}

who wants to be found on ms search engines anyways.