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Mon, Aug 03, 2009

Bing referral spam

• Post categories: Omni, In The News, Technology, My Life

So I got sick of it the other day, and since there's been no actual visits from Bing, just bots pretending to be, I put in a simple .htaccess entry:

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bing\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Which simply prevents anything that lists Bing as a referral from accessing the site. Crude but what the Hell.

I got linked to here on a comment on Ars though, so I swapped out my no-Bing-refs-at-all entry for their suggestion:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^65\.55\.(104|107|109|110|165|232)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} " MSIE 6.0; "
RewriteRule .* - [F]

It means Bing's bot can't map my site. But I'm fine with that: If they stop spamming my logs to make themselves look good, I'll stop blocking them. Considering how insignificant Bing is in the search arena, I fail to see a downside ;o)

1 comment » •

1 comment

Comment from: Hari [Member] · http://harishankar.org/blog/

I considered banning the the bing referrals myself, but then it MIGHT potentially block genuine searchers and that I didn't want to block.

The problem with this kind of spam is that we KNOW that bing is a genuine search engine and we want to avoid blocking a potential traffic source and yet they take advantage of their status and use low-down, cheap tactics to inflate their usage figures.

I feel that if you want to totally block bing, it's better to ban all the bot IP addresses specifically rather than target referrer traffic.

04/08/09 @ 03:52

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