MS Admits to Referral Spamming for As Cloaking Check

Hot off the press: after the fuss raised by a bunch of us a few weeks ago, Donna now reports that Live ponies up about the referrer spam. They’ve issued a statement where they:

• A bug that caused issues with AdSense/Overture reporting.
• Distorting site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic (except we know how to filter them!)
• Polluting HTTP logs with inappropriate terms (true).

Microsoft also states that "Hopefully webmasters have also noticed these issues disappearing. If you are still experiencing any issues, please contact us before you block MSNBot, to see if we can address the issue."

Let me be the first to say a big thank you to Microsoft for making a very solid public response to the issue and answering our questions. This kind of transparency is exactly what fosters a good relationship between a search engine and webmasters.

And yes, Live.com team, I do default to your search engine for my searches. Works a treat (most of the time ).