Richard Walker

Can someone please explain to me why Microsoft/Bing are spidering sites in large volume, from 65.55.0.0, and not identifying themselves as a bot/spider in their user agent?

While you’re at it…. explain what sort of impact this has on perceived conversion rates when the conversion:impression ratio ends up being a million miles apart.

Here’s a handy piece of code for your stats install (if running inhouse or AWStats or something similar):


<Directory "/path-to-stats-stuff">
Order deny,allow
Deny from 65.55.0.0/255.255.0.0
Allow from all
</Directory>


TOTALLY off-topic, and the last thing I’d usually write about, but I found this recently while trying to diagnose my parent’s jack-russell terrier, Browser.

Snippet from The Glittering Eye follows:

It’s an oldie but a goodie. I don’t know the original source of this but it’s pretty wellknown to dog lovers.

YELLOW URKA-GURKA

Dog runs around the house and hides under furniture while making a prolonged ‘uuuuurka-guuuuurka, uuurka-guurka’ noise. (This noise is the only thing guaranteed to wake up a true dog lover who is hung over from a post dog-show celebration at 3:30 a.m.) After mad scrambling to capture the dog and drag him outside, the episode ends with an inaudible ten yard slimy yellow froth from the living room rug to the back door.

BLAP DISEASE

Dog exercises hard and (a) eats large mouthfuls of snow (winter Blap Disease) or (b) drinks a bucket of water (Summer Blap Disease). Within two minutes of returning inside, the dog spews out large amounts of clear slimy liquid while making a distinctive ‘blap’ sound and a sharp percussive noise as it hits the linoleum.

GARKS

Dog suddenly clears his throat with loud and dramatic ‘gggaark, gggark’ noises generally followed by prolonged ‘iiiksss’ and then loud satisfied smacking noises. There is nothing on the rug. Don’t investigate, you don’t want to know.

RALFS

Apropos of nothing, the dog strolls into the dining room and waits till the innocent dinner guests are all watching him. Then, with a single deep gut wrenching ‘raaaalff’ dislodges the entire weeks’ contents of his stomach on the dining room rug.

Variation: Then he eats it.

In all the above events the dog is entirely healthy and indeed deeply pleased with himself.