There are some visitors that insist on visiting removed pages over and over again. The Microsoft msnbot does seem to have other agendas than merely indexing websites for their search engine. This blog post is about UserAgent spam.
I noticed this log entry in the apache access log:
65.55.110.182 notes.endnode.se [30/Dec/2009:09:21:02 +0100] "GET /tags/website.xhtml HTTP/1.1" 301 235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
The last part/row above states that MSIE 6.0 would be visiting my page. That could have indicated that someone with an old browser decided to visit my site.
The IP address 65.55.110.182 has no PTR, reverse dns lookup, but its neigbors have.
65.55.110.180 - not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) 65.55.110.181 - msnbot-65-55-110-181.search.msn.com. 65.55.110.182 - not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) 65.55.110.183 - msnbot-65-55-110-183.search.msn.com. 65.55.110.184 - not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) 65.55.110.185 - msnbot-65-55-110-185.search.msn.com.
The forward DNS has also been verified.
In short by only identifying as a web browser Microsoft is spamming the web browser statistics with their own browser. The question is, why would they want us to believe that MSIE 6.0 is still visiting our sites?
