• Search Engine Land, Thursday, August 27, 2009 2:15 PM

Danny Sullivan believes it's time for Microsoft's search engine to stop generating fake information that can make site owners think they're getting erroneous search traffic, including porn. It's been happening for more than two years, he writes, pointing to Microsoft's crawler as the culprit.

The crawler, known as MSNBot, gathers information from a Web page. The problem is ot sometimes "leaves behind 'referrer' information in a Web site's logs -- fake referrer information." Sullivan explains that crawlers don't normally report referrer data. He also explains why Microsoft continues to use this practice.

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