Hi-ho,
I've seen this as well, although one pretending to be Baiduspider in my
case which is a Chinese search engine (www.baidu.com is the real site)
I was getting 300-400 hits a day from three IP's in a range without
reverse DNS records, somewhere in Asia.
I put a block on the IP address range in the end, not because of the
traffic to the server, but because it was skewing the stats on one site
I really wanted accurate info on.
Going back to the previous thread about google/search engines, if you
pretend to be google (or another robot) lots of things work that might
not work otherwise. Andy Leach's link to webmasterworld in this thread
is a good example. Their site comes up as high ranking hits for quite a
few searches relating to this sort of thing, but you need to log in to
read the forums. Odd that google can spider them, but we can't surf
them without logging in. ("Dark search engine techniques" apparently :-) )
Spambots pretend to be google (and other search spiders) so they can
spider forums like webmasterworld for email addresses. It's very much
in webmasterworld's interest to have search engines spider their forums
as they get great search rankings. (Not specifically picking on
webmastersworld, Just using it as an example, this is a common scenario.)
Even if you're not a spammer there are other reasons for pretending to
be a spider, but given we're already way OT, I might keep that for
another day.
It's a food chain thing, the spammers need the email addresses, the
forums need the hits. I'm sure Steve Irwin could have done a
documentary on it! :-) Crikey! Look at those headers! The referer code
looks munged, but the server is just lapping it up!
Cheers, Chris H.
Steve Holdoway wrote:
I've just noticed that a host known as 'dedicated.jjmorrison.org' , who is
obviously using shared hosting somewhere in the US, is visiting my websites
(which are LAMP based - tenuous link) and identifying itsenf as a Googlebot,
version 2.1.
Has anyone else seen similar behaviour???
Cheers,
Steve
