MSN Live Search Quality check fake search traffic, how to identify to filter in web analytics? regarding http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2007/12/04/live-search-and-cloaking-detection.aspx Live Search and Cloaking Detection Our websites are still getting massive amounts of this fake traffic from MSN that looks like real traffic but is not. We understand that MSN is working to fix this. In the mean time we need to filter the fake MSN traffic from our web analytics reporting. How can we identify the fake traffic in our logs so that we can filter it out of our web analytics reporting? Thanks for your help. Miguel Goforth webmaster www.BestImage.com
About 25 to 50 fake visits a week per local real estate agent website. It is telling that MSN has not responded to this thread. This is why they don't do well in search. Lack of support. Anyway we found a way to filter the fake traffic. In the refferer domain from MSNlive in our log files. The Url has "form=" in it. After the "form=" are about 4 letters. If you compare fake traffic to real, the fake traffic has a different pattern of letters than the real traffic. We filtrer on that. But Note the letters for the fake traffic do change, so you have to monitor and look out for a change in the letters. Thanks, Miguel