Found this referrer my server logs today:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=wordle

Whoa, could my little website be ranking for “wordle” just a couple days after I mentioned it in a post?

Of course not. But the MSN/Live Search bot sends phony HTTP_REFERER strings when it crawls sites.

You know, I’ve seen faked referrers in my logs a lot. Here are a few actual examples to demonstrate the fine enterprises Microsoft is apparently emulating:

http://www.feelgoodpharma.com/product/c/57
http://www.viagraoverstock.com/
http://www.igsvmortgage.com
http://www.blacks-xxx.com/latina_sucks_monster_meat_rod.htm

(I know this is old news. The fact that Microsoft is still spamming websites with faked referrers a year later is confounding. One thing is sure — the day I run into bandwidth overcharges for this server, msnbot is going to be given a starring role in my robots.txt file.)