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[email protected]. Weird creature, weird name. If you are a webmaster or just a web site owner most likely you already heard about internet bots. You also know that there are bad and good bots. For example, Google or Yahoo is using bots to crawl your site and place your pages at the top of the list of search pages (SERP). These are very good. OK, not always at the top. But still these ones are not so bad. And, surely, when you'll see the botbot you'll wonder what is this www robot good for. Or BAD for.
Bandwidth wasting could be a problem, but since internet and its technologies evolve this tends to not be anymore the most stringent problem. However, some server overload can be accused. SPAM is another bad goal of certain bots, but this may not affect your site directly. So, which is the [email protected] business?
Our software engineers trapped botbot, IP: 71.13.115.117 – User Agent: bot/1.0 (bot; http://; [email protected]) and studied its behavior. And this is what they discovered: [email protected] is stealing your website! Right, this application performs automated tasks to steal content from your web site and to create so-called “doorway pages” – fake web pages using text from your site and from other sites, with the only purpose to rank well in SERP and then to redirect the visitors to various black or white business of the robot owners.
What does this mean? Either you are an internet software publisher or e-commerce site owner this means stolen places in the search results page, because these pages usually being optimized for search engines will rank at the top, stolen visitors and less customers.
Even though Google, Yahoo and other search engines will penalize these black SEO practices, it may take a long term (very long term) until the uncovering and action, so you cannot count on this. You must take action and block bad bots like this, otherwise your finances will go down.
That's why it's not enough to say once it is bad. BOT BOT is BAD BAD.
More about Doorway pages or How to block bad bots will come in the SoftSpecialist next articles. Until next time Keep Safe! Safe software and safe websites.
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