"Microsoft’s most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms (泛站群). The sites in quest

"Microsoft’s most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms (泛站群). The sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China’s TLD and internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com domains available for as little as ¥17 (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share (for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide - for example 59% of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide." source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/07/31/july-2014-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/07/31/july-2014-web-s...