Thread: Microsoft Bot pretending to be Google Bot ?

I can only guess why Microsoft keeps sending out the MSN bot as Googlebot [ apparently Mediapartners-Google is the Adsense bot ]..

This has being going on for a while. This is from today.

403 User-Agent claimed to be Googlebot- claim appears to be false.
Agent: Mediapartners-Google
207.46.204.103 msnbot-207-46-204-103.search.msn.com

403 User-Agent claimed to be Googlebot- claim appears to be false.
Agent: Mediapartners-Google
207.46.204.53 msnbot-207-46-204-53.search.msn.com

403 User-Agent claimed to be Googlebot- claim appears to be false.
Agent: Mediapartners-Google
207.46.204.96 msnbot-207-46-204-96.search.msn.com

403 User-Agent claimed to be Googlebot- claim appears to be false.
Agent: Mediapartners-Google
207.46.204.103 msnbot-207-46-204-103.search.msn.com

I'll keep blocking that confused Msnbot until those guys at Microsoft who are running it remember who they work for..

I can only guess at the reasons behind it..

Maybe because Microsoft just doesn't have the same access to sites that people extend to the googlebot, they are jealous of that, so someone decided to switch over the MSNbot useragent to something more successful. eg: googlebot.

This would be a perfect example of that old saying, "if you can't beat them, join them".

Possibly Microsoft has been hacked into again and their Msnbot has been hijacked, now being run by hackers to collect data..

Is it some advertising deal with Google or just a useragent ripoff. ?

Can anyone think of other reasons why Microsoft would need or want to do this with the poor old msnbot ?

Maybe the ip address that suggests that it is the msnbot initially is not trustworthy and is set up to trick the bad bot tracker?

I checked the IP addresses. They are assigned to Microsoft.

Mike, what tool are you using that is snagging those bots and displaying the messages?

I use bot-trap on several of my sites. Microsoft spiders frequently ignore the robots.txt file and get banned by bot-trap. I have never had a problem with Google or Yahoo spiders.

I wonder if they licensed the use of an ad spider from Google and did not change the user agent.

Those bots are being caught by BadBehavior.

Here's what it looks like in the logs:

msnbot-207-46-204-102.search.msn.com - - [06/Nov/2010:00:41:40 -0500] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 403 1693 "-" "Mediapartners-Google"
msnbot-207-46-204-96.search.msn.com - - [06/Nov/2010:00:41:48 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 15963 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)"
msnbot-207-46-204-96.search.msn.com - - [06/Nov/2010:00:43:04 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 1683 "-" "Mediapartners-Google"
msnbot-207-46-204-139.search.msn.com - - [06/Nov/2010:00:44:07 -0500] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 403 1693 "-" "Mediapartners-Google"
msnbot-207-46-204-53.search.msn.com - - [06/Nov/2010:00:46:45 -0500] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 403 1692 "-" "Mediapartners-Google"

Found some more about cloaked msnbots here:
MSN's many cloaked bots. Again. Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification forum at WebmasterWorld