What does this mean in my log?

[AmyNY]

In early July I changed to a full service host. Previously did not get logs. Anyway please help me to understand the following entry:

The ip address is alta vista.
We don't have an index.html page just index.htm page. Sometimes the old index.html page gets ftped accidently but I don't think that has any significance here.
So the big question, why the adult site? And this looks like alta vista's robot?

216.39.48.34 - - [19/Aug/2003:19:39:49 -0500] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" 404 7446 "http://www.example.net/name-name-nude/keyword-keyword-keyword" "Scooter/3.3"

Thanks.

Amy

[edited by: heini at 4:53 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2003]
[edit reason] Examplified url [/edit]

[TallTroll]

1) I'm not sure that's quite the right UA for an AV bot
2) the URL (which will need to be snipped I'm afraid) looks like it *should* be the referring URL
3) you have just been the victim of log spam! Does your new host leave your stats publically open, by any chance? If so, its a sneaky way of trying to get some free link pop

[AmyNY]

1) I'm not sure that's quite the right UA for an AV bot
2) the URL (which will need to be snipped I'm afraid) looks like it *should* be the referring URL
3) you have just been the victim of log spam! Does your new host leave your stats publically open, by any chance? If so, its a
sneaky way of trying to get some free link pop

What does UA mean?
Didn't know I had to cut out their URL. Sorry.
What is log spam?
I switched to westhost. Don't know if stats are publically open.

[TallTroll]

UA = User Agent, the identifying string that various clients are supposed to use to identify themselves, so HTTP servers know which content to serve (this is the basis of various browser detection scripts for instance)

>> Didn't know I had to cut out their URL. Sorry

That's OK. We like to try and keep discussions as generic as possible. Adult content, in any form, is very specifically against the ToS as we do have minors who visit the board. Just don't do it again ;)

>> What is log spam?

Sometimes, website stats are left open to public viewing. This means that search engine spiders can see them too. Now, imagine that you are a especially devious webmaster I like devious webmasters, and you want a bit of free link popularity. Publically open logs are nearly as good as unmoderated guestbooks for this, you write buy in a spider of your own, give it a UA of, say, a genuine search engine spider, and tell it to fake the referring URL header to be an URL that you wish to promote. Not knowing any better, the recieveing server will blithely accept any old tale you tell it... and publish that information to a publically viewable web page, the stats page.

Ker-ching, instant links! Of course, you have to feed your, ahem, "modified" spider a list of URLs to visit, preferably ones with known open stats pages... but if you've got some cheap bandwidth available, just set it free.

[jdMorgan]

Amy,

That visit was from a legitimate AltaVista IP address, and the user-agent is valid. Here's a similar AV spider visit logged on one of my sites:

216.39.48.204 - - [19/Aug/2003:21:41:17 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 2741 "-" "Scooter/3.3"

I agree with TallTroll that the visit you logged is probably the result of a log spamming attempt picked up by AV's spider. Either that, or there's a link to your site from the page you cited. That could be someone trying to ruin your reputation in search engines that look for bad neighborhoods.

The link is incorrect though, so your server returned a 404-Not Found response.

You might want to search for that referring page in AV, and see if you can find out anything. If you decide to go look at the page itself, be sure to disable active scripting (JavaScript) in your browser before doing so; you don't need any further unpleasant surprises!

Jim

[ringmaster1]

If you type /logs

at the end of your your url and your stats show up that is one way of finding out if your stats are public with webalizer