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A Very Unfortunate Error For Farecast and Live

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 06/25/2008 - 10:56.

Posted by Jane Copland

This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [cheap flights] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed farecast.live.com.

The first thing I noticed was the unfortunate title tag and snippet. However, things got stranger when I clicked through to the site. Before I go on, I should say that before it was bought by Microsoft, Farecast was an SEOmoz client. They aren't anymore, but the fact that I'd worked within the niche and with this site before was what caught my attention.

The page loaded, but I definitely didn't recognise the content as belonging to either Farecast or Microsoft.

Refreshing the page brought consistently different results. Here is a sample:

Each refresh brought up another strange page, including several error pages. Attempting to complete a search on a page that did load properly was also impossible. I wondered what would happen if you visited Farecast's previous domain: Up until a few minutes ago, www.farecast.com was not redirecting to farecast.live.com for me. Without the www, it was redirecting. It appears to be working now.

Web-Sniffer's results were also amusing, as refreshing farecast.live.com's Web-Sniffer result brought up alternate pages on every attempt as well. Whilst the strange, rotating content was interesting, the fact that the parked page showed up was more so. Suspecting that this was a DNS error of Microsoft's making, Rob wondered if he could add Live.com to his list of parked domains. He could.

Holy Christ. Sedo thought that Rob owned Live.com and was crediting him with the commission from the page. The conversation went something like this, with a couple of edits:
 
23:02:05 Rob: oh s**t!
23:02:23 Rob: "Live.com has successfully been added to your parking account"
23:02:28 Jane: no
23:02:29 Jane: f***ing
23:02:29 Jane: way
 
A couple of weeks ago, Duncan wrote about Apple.com and the localisation issues they have in using Akamai, whose load-balancing system results in solely U.S. content being shown to Googlebot. Akamai serves content based upon location, and it seems that someone at Microsoft added a Sedo IP address to the routing system Akamai employs.

Since earning income in this manner is well and truly illegal, Rob emailed Sedo immediately. The traffic and commission has stopped and the problem appears to have been rectified. Similarly on Microsoft's end, farecast.live.com now resolves correctly.

Because Rob can explain this stuff far better than I can (although he's promised to teach me if I continue buying him pints of Guinness), I'll let him spell out what happened:

It appears that Microsoft is using Akamai for their DNS and Content Distribution Network on farecast.live.com. This usually involves either the service provider caching a copy of their client's content on globally distributed servers to prevent server overloading, or filtering out the requests between the client's servers in order to balance load. My best guess is that a Microsoft employee has specified an IP address belonging to the domain auction and parking provider, Sedo. Sedo's parking servers are designed to allow any domain name to point to them (in this case the subdomain farecast.live.com) and serve appropriate adverts for the domain.

Oh, the consequences of not keeping a close eye on your sites, especially if you're a big site and are ranking for some money keywords. Maybe Live can be pleased that Rob and I came across this and not someone just a little bit more sinister.

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