MSN Referrer Spam - Block MSNbot With Robots.txt

Sick of Microsoft's spam referrer campaign? You can respond to this assault on your logs with a simple step.

Just add the following lines to the top of your robots.txt file:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /


It won't stop the referrer spam from MSN, but it sends a message.

MSN.com and Live.com send just a few hundred visitors per month to this site which generally gets a couple thousand visitors per day. I've had enough of the fake referrers from MSN in my server logs.

There are currently 2,360 pages indexed in MSN Live.com Search so it will be interesting to see how long it takes for them to drop this site from their index:

If you have taken the step to block Microsoft's search engine from your site with robots.txt please leave a comment below.

UPDATE: It's February 14, 2008 now and here is what Live.com is displaying for this site. Notice the weird text snippets:

I decided to unblock msnbot on March 6, 2009. Even though this site has been blocked from MSN for 14 or 15 months, it's still getting about 30 visitors per month from MSN/Live, and ranks #10 for brazilian bikini models.

I'm experimenting to see what happens to traffic after MSN/Live is unblocked.