Blackhat SEO - Esrun

MSN search changes to live search

September 14, 2006 on 4:50 pm | In Blackhat SEO |

Today MSN changed from their standard beta search to the new Live.com search engine. In an effort to beat scraper sites which are cloaking based on user_agent and http_referer they are purposely blocking the referer page when forwarding users onto websites!

How many blackhat seo mass builders will this effect!? I expect quite a few!

An example of sites this could effect:

Cloaking based on referer. For example the site may show an adsense filled page if the visitor comes from a search engine but a ‘This site has been suspended’ page if the visitor comes from anywhere else. This would effectively mean that you can spam blogs and such like and when they click through to checkout your site they will think it has been suspended and won’t follow it up bitching to Google.

Update: This thing has been playing on my mind. It just didn’t seem logical to prevent the passing of the http referer and I think I may have figured a possible reason other than to kick webspammers down. My theory is that Microsoft purposely made it so that the referer wouldn’t be passed onto the final destination site so that they could put up a LIVE test site without webmasters checking their logs and looking at the referring site and therefore finding the new test LIVE search system before Microsoft were ready to release it! I believe Microsoft have then simply forgotton to fix this before releasing it to the public!