North American Network Operators Group

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Potentially on-Topic: is MSNBot for real?

  • From: Mark Foster
  • Date: Fri Sep 22 06:42:00 2006


On a website I host with nearly 9000 unique visits month-to-date (thats visits, not hits) a full 20% of the recorded 'hits' (Hitcount is ~40,000) are being generated by 'msnbot'. We see this as a large amount of http traffic from IP addresses owned by Microsoft.

I've actually seen this across a number of websites (including my own) but the guest on my server has raised the issue of loading being completely misproportionate to the perceived value of the visit - and asked about potentially blocking them off entirely.

Is this unusual, or what? Are search engines supposed to be amongst the biggest user agents recorded on a typical website? How much trolling and indexing is considered 'too much' ?

At what point to the search engines themselves become a menace - the load the cause outweighs the value of said load? (I'd like my cpu cycles to be for real people, please...)

Off-list thoughts on this welcome if the operational relevance of this issue is questioned...

Cheers
Mark.