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