Saturday, March 08, 2008

Jayde NicheBot Crawls for iEntry's Web of Sites

Who out there remembers the Jayde directory?

Some of us submitted our sites to Jayde way back in '96 or '97, who knows exactly, and now our sites are being hit by something called the "Jayde NicheBot".

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) Jayde NicheBot"
I was curious why some site I submitted to about 10 years ago was pinging my server all these years later so I did a little research to see what they'd been up to in the interim and they appear to have been very prolific, almost to domain park proportions.

Jayde is currently owned by iEntry.com and if you have McAfee SiteAdvisor enabled in your browser it goes RED meaning that iEntry has something negative on file with SiteAdvisor that says the following:
Feedback from credible users suggests that this site sends either high volume or 'spammy' e-mails.
Took a look and found someone that posted one of those 'spammy emails' with a ton of iEntry's domain names listed.

On iEntry's website they claim:
iEntry properties include more than 370 Web sites and over 100 e-mail newsletters that are viewed by more than 5 million users every month.
Did a quick search for their 370 sites and Yahoo finds over 170 of them.

It appears iEntry owns ExactSeek.com, sitepronews.com, webpronews.com, metawebsearch.com, seo-news.com (and forum), and a ton of directories, bunch of sites here, shitload of sites there, and last but not least here it's tied together with ISEDN.ORG

Google and Yahoo could find listings about my sites in a bunch of their directories which begs the question:

Why does Google and Yahoo index all those redundant directories?

I found references to my sites in about 40 of them, there's a shock, knock me over with a feather. About 40 sites was all Google and Yahoo would easily report, and the answer to the "why are they indexed?" question appears to be that the order of the listings in the directory are changed for the same content on a different site so it seems to be unique per directory as far as the search engines are concerned. Maybe there were other changes as well, I didn't look to deep.

However, I did check Live search which doesn't appear to be so gullible as it only reported the duplicate content in 5 sites.

Hey, submit your link, it's FREE and you can advertise too!

Hope I didn't blow out anyone's sarcasm meter with that last quip.

3 comments:

SteveG said...

WebProWorld is another iEntry "product".. We had an ongoing "debate" over there a year or two ago about all the spam you get from them.. Rightnow I have over 100 iEntry directories in a spreadsheet that appear to be used simply for email harvesting..

Very sad way to run a business in my opinion..

RedCardinal said...

There is also a Keyword product called NicheBot...

Might be connected? nichebot.com I believe.

Anonymous said...

@ RedCardinal
I have blocked nichebot.com ages ago.they scrape your site for keyword ideas etc killing bandwith,at a fast rate too may i add..get your own ideas a/holes.

I have also blocked a heap like them,including also even many monitering services looking for trouble