Anyone getting Spam Traffic from m.thefacebook.com

[Archbob]

Hi,
Last week, I started getting a surge of pure spam traffic from m.thefacebook.com with 100% bounce. Think its from FB's mobile app. I don't want to block facebook because it does give me legit traffic sometimes but should I just block m.thefacebook.com?

[keyplyr]

Absolutely. Thousands of bots crawl the links found at all the FB URLs. They will use many different UAs (user agents) and pretend to be human.

The more you interact at FB, the more your links gets posted, the more bots you see in your logs. There's a price to pay for the wealth of real traffic at Social Media.

Latest stats show that more than 50% of your site traffic is from bots not humans.

More info found at Search Engine Spider & User Agent ID Forum [webmasterworld.com]

[Archbob]

I think its all from this IP block:

173.252.114

Does anyone ban this IP in .htaccess, Its fb's hitbot or something.

[not2easy]

That is part of Facebook's range, you don't want to block that. As suggested, there is a forum to discuss UserAgents and how to keep out the ones that might be causing grief.

[keyplyr]

@Archbob - It sounds like you're using software to check your server activity (Google Analytics, Piwik, AWStats, etc.) While those programs do give you some interesting information, they miss too much and/or give you misinformation.

You'll get more accurate information by just downloading your raw server logs and using a text editor to look through it.

[Archbob]

It definitely a facebook bot, its not real. My raw logs show that a ton of referrals in that IP range. I don't know why its hitting me so hard.

[Archbob]

I don't see the forum to discuss userAgents, where is it?

[engine]

Archbob, you'll find the forum here [webmasterworld.com...]

Added - scroll down this post to see all the forums [webmasterworld.com...]

[Straitus]

In my niche the social referrals are minimal, generally. But i've not seen 'thefacebook.com'. Isn't that different from m.facebook.com? Couldn't you block 'thefacebook.com' without harming the other FB traffic?

[keyplyr]

@Straitus and everyone else. As not2easy said above, you don't want to block Facebook. The
'thefacebook.com' is a FB property and a valid referrer.

FB will check links and all the files on that link. It is normal to get several hundred every single day.