There is a thread I have been watching at the Bing Community where one member said that he had log files that shows MSNBot (Microsoft Bing’s crawler) is clicking on Microsoft adCenter search ads, possibly charging him for those clicks.

This advertiser set up very specific tracking URLs for the adCenter campaigns and noticed that MSNBot came up for triggering a click on that ad URL in his log files. The advertiser asked:

There is still no clear answer from Microsoft or the webmaster as to why those URLs were found in the log file. I keep asking for an update to the thread, but no response yet.

Maybe it was a bug on the webmaster side or maybe it was a bug on the MSNBot side. I do not know, but I would love to hear some type of answer on this matter.

We all know, bots can drive a huge amount of clicks, really quickly. So it would trigger a read flag in the ad quality measurements.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.