MikeBogo.com - Marketing and Monetizing

The money is out there…

Sex Sells! Referral Traffic from “Sex” Keyword?

I was looking at my traffic stats earlier, when I noticed something unusual. Take a look:

Sex

AWstats is annoying in that it doesn’t tell you which search engine sent you this, or from what page. So I dug into my logs, and I found this as the referrer:

http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=sex&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP

Now, we all know the Live! search engine is still far from perfect, but why is it sending me traffic from the keyword “sex“? Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work, so I can’t tell exactly how this one person found my site through this search, but if anyone knows what FORM=LVSP stands for, I’d like to know, because this blog has nothing to do with sex.

That’s just more proof the Live! isn’t going to be competition anytime soon.

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March 4th, 2007 posted in Blog History, Top, Windows Live | 9 comments

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9 Comments »

    Jester wrote @ 6:14 pm on March 4, 2007:

    Of course by virtue of this post, you can now legitimately be returned in searches for sex.


    Mike Bogo wrote @ 7:49 pm on March 4, 2007:

    Jester, you’re absolutely right.

    I’ve already gotten 8 extra visitors from Google’s Blogsearch and Blogger search from the keyword “sex.”


    jester wrote @ 7:54 pm on March 4, 2007:

    Jester, you’re absolutely right.

    I do believe those are the sweetest words on the planet. :)


    epiphyte wrote @ 12:10 am on March 16, 2007:

    I’m wondering the same thing myself. I’m about to release a subscriber only feature for my site that publicly displays search terms used to find their artwork but I’m wondering if I should exclude live.com from the query because of all the completely irrelevant, inappropriate and sexually explicit search terms that it’s coming up with.


    Mike Bogo wrote @ 9:56 am on March 16, 2007:

    Epiphyte,

    I’d say that’s a good idea, at least for the short term. Later on you can bring it back into the game once it starts showing reasonable results.


    Jesper wrote @ 4:14 pm on March 22, 2007:

    Hi. Did you ever figure out the FORM=LVSP refferal from Windows Live?

    I got a few of them in my logs as well and are really curious. I get hits from words I know isn’t on my web site. Sometimes sex-related.


    Mike Bogo wrote @ 8:26 pm on March 22, 2007:

    Hey Jesper, I was just recently sent a thread about this (at bottom).

    Basically, since the IP seems to be coming from an MS-owned IP range, the belief is that they may be doing quality checks on certain phrases before they make a data push out, and these hits are based on either automatic or human checks. However, I haven’t myself confirmed whether this was an MS IP, so I can’t say whether my data supports this theory. It’s something I’ll look into.

    WebmasterWorld Forum Link


    Tim Dineen wrote @ 9:36 am on September 29, 2007:

    Hi Mike,

    Here is another source on the topic, and my personal opinion on my Microsoft is doing exactly the wrong thing to people with their intentional faked referrers.

    http://www.exposureonline.com/2007/09/Microsoft-is-lying-and-screwing-up-your-log-files.cfm


    Mike Bogo wrote @ 10:04 am on September 29, 2007:

    Thanks for the info Tim!

    Why they would be using sex as a quality check keyword, I don’t know. Somebody at Microsoft has made some bad calls regarding this situation.


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