jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Last week, we reported on what appears to be more cloaking tests by Bing, where referrer data for websites are being spammed (by Microsoft) with fake data. There have been more and more complaints about this in the Bing forums.

A new thread sprung up in the Bing Forums where Brett Yount, program manager for Bing, said:

We are rolling out a new spider, so it is possible that might be causing your activity increase. If this is becoming more of a problem, please send me a mail at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “single word query complaint” in the subject line and I will investigate.

Clearly, Microsoft now has a name for this issue internally. They are calling this a “complaint” but more importantly, it might be isolated to single word queries. In our example last week, the single word in that case was “donate”. In the new thread, it is “copper,” plus other undisclosed terms, not specifically mentioned by webmasters.

There is no official explanation from Microsoft on this issue, as of yet.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Related posts:

1. Bing Doesn’t Support the Canonical Tag At All Right Now
2. Bing Webmaster Tools Bug Won’t Allow Adding Sites
3. Bing’s Fake Referrer Spam Back, Now Hiding Referrer Now?
4. Bing Not Honoring Robots.txt Directives?
5. Bing Mobile’s Language Bug & How To Fix It
6. Did Microsoft Finally Fix The Fake Referrer Spam Issue?
7. Microsoft Bing Still Spamming Fake Referrers In Webmaster Log Files
8. Microsoft Claims To Fix Fake Referrals or “Single Word Query” Complaint
9. More Cloaking Tests In Form Of Fake Referrers From Microsoft Bing?
10. Case of Accidental Search Engine Cloaking
11. Google Blog Search Updates Link Query Algorithm
12. Google Still Showing Different Results Based on Query Case