I’ve recently noticed in my logs lots of visits to my posts from a Microsoft IP block (the last one was 65.55.109.226), supposedly with a referrer of http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=[random keyword]&form=QBHP .

My posts never appear on the search results page, in fact some keywords are completely irrelevant.

The visits even show up in my Woopra log, which means the bots must support JavaScript. Annoyingly due the the low volume of visits to my site, this is really throwing off my statistics. In particular, because the bot is reporting a screen resolution of 800×600, my total stats show 14% of visitors have that resolution (which clearly isn’t accurate).

I found this post on Blogboing (and this older one), and this fuller explanation (including instructions on how to block it), which partially explains them, but the Microsoft response is clearly rubbish. As far as I’m concerned, this is just referrer spam, and another reason not to use Live Search!

I don’t think I’ll block them for now, but may do if it continues.