Sunday, March 09, 2008

Gone Fishkin With More SEOMoz Tool Activity

In my continue series of exposing SEO tools we find this little SEOmoz-bot over at SEOmoz.

I'll give SEOmoz some credit where credit is due in they at least identify their tool as a bot so it can be blocked if you want. However, they don't check robots.txt to see if the bot is allowed as I think they assume it's always going to be used by the site owner but it could just as easily be used on some competitor's site as well.

Here are the IPs and the user agent used:

209.40.115.202 "SEOmoz-bot"
209.40.116.200 "SEOmoz-bot"
The IP's belong to HopOne which provides various services including hosting.
OrgName: HopOne Internet Corporation
NetName: HOPONE-DCA2-4
NetRange: 209.40.96.0 - 209.40.127.255
I think that range is safe to block as it appears they use 'DC' in the net name of their data centers but it's probably worth checking to see what bounces for a few days to make sure.

Of course the best SEO is secure SEO, so block 'em ;)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

But, Bill, don't you want to use the tools to analyze stuff? Our crawling is very polite and limited only to actual user requests.

IncrediBILL said...

Hey Rand!

But what if those actual user requests are made by someone I don't want snooping through my site?

I didn't say it was a bad tool, just reporting the details so my loyal readers (both of them) can decide whether to opt-in or opt-out of letting someone aim it at their website.

Considering I advocate white listing which blocks virtually everything, someone that white lists would need to know what I posted just to be able to allow your tool access!

Anonymous said...

Fair enough, Bill :) Hope to see you in Seattle for SMX Advanced!

Anonymous said...

Great stuff Bill. Imo, NO tools are ever necessary for sites. The more of these bots we all can block, the better off we all are. The only tool you need is a site 404 checker, your site stats or log files, and the ability to go to yahoo and google and do "manual" searches.

Who the hell would be naive enough to allow these SEO types to snoop through their sites? I have NO idea. Tools are just something SEO types make up to make a buck.