M$ testing to see if tinfoil hat sales increase?

If they were still sending convoluted referrers with any regularity I would happily put it down to referrer spam ;)

"behave slightly differently"

Yep, that explains what the Drake is Holding.

Without this thread i'd be completely in the dark right now...as there's nobody else really talking about it.

Looks like i'm another victim of the DrakeBot , I guess we can call it. I was wondering why during the last hour, 100 people using Internet Explorer...from Alcoi, Spain were using my site .. When my site in particular usually only gets like 50 visitors for a a whole day.

Referral was specified as Drake Holdings LLC ...as seen in image below. And as u can see i've had 132 of them visit during the last hour...spidering all my pages. Their showing up as actual unique visitors as well...not bots.

Why is Microsoft being shady like this...and not explaining ? It just makes them look more silly trying to be all 'plain clothes' about it.

another interesting factor I just noticed...is how half of the browsers are using Windows 7 and the other half Vista. Split 50/50 -

@mikeinjersey Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Be careful with the GA data. Google lists the operating systems for Drake UAs as below:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0; Trident/5.0) - Win 7
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0; Trident/5.0) - Vista

They're also wrong on Spain, I think. E.g. they list Spain for the Drake IP range 204.79.180.*

maybe their using networks of their older (outdated) computers as Bots.

one thing I gotta admit (on a positive note) , i recently made changes across thousands of pages on a domain ...and it was updated in Bing's live cache (search engine) within a few days. compared to google where it usually takes a month or longer to index all those pages at once.

I saw this on one of my sites today and was wondering what was up. Site used to advertise on Google and Bing, ranks on Bing. Sort of on pause right now so all traffic is getting the eagle eye.

Interesting thread, from reading this it seems like it could be a tool that is trying to figure out why sites rank on bing. Or some sort of ranking tool.

I blocked both IP ranges on web.config level and don't loose any sleep over it:

192.92.196.0/24
204.79.180.0/24

<rules>
<rule name="- Drake Holdings LLC">
 <match url=".*" ignoreCase="false" />
 <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAny">
  <add input="{REMOTE_ADDR}" pattern="^192\.92\.196." /> 
  <add input="{REMOTE_ADDR}" pattern="^204\.79\.180." /> 
 </conditions>
<action type="AbortRequest" />
</rule>
</rules>