MSN is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Microsoft.
MSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Sample user agent strings sent by MSN:
msnbot/1.1 ( http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
MSN follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: msnbot Disallow: /
User-agent: msnbot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: msnbot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: msnbot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: msnbot group, MSN ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.msnbot from MSN's user agent; check Microsoft's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
MSN brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake MSN requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep MSN allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersMSN indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow MSN on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows MSN by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
MSN is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Microsoft. MSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine.
Yes. MSN follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the msnbot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: msnbot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "msnbot/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so MSN may not follow it, and anyone can send MSN's user agent, so a fake MSN ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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