Forum Moderators: open
I haven't posted in a forum like this before, but when I did a google search trying to figure out an odd entry in the logs for my husband's website, this forum came up.
I am somewhat of a newbie, so please bear with me.
The following entry is in the logs:
A visitor from 64.210.196.198 (64.210.196.198)
arrived from www.lrh.de/,
and visited www.scientologyintegrity.org/index.shtml
at 4:56:11 PM on Wednesday, January 8, 2003.
This visitor used Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; Girafabot; girafabot at girafa dot com; [girafa.com)....]
I have two questions:
1. Does the IP logged above relate to Girafabot? (the who is says it's exodus communications though)
2. the refferal link above www.lrh.de, when clicked on, refers straight to www.scientologyintegrity.org. When I load www.lrh.de in my browser as well, it changes the address immediately to the homepage listed above. How is this possible since my husband has no domain of www.lrh.de?
Thanks very much in advance,
vmcc
Many allow it access. [AKA Jim :-)]
I'm quite overbearing and don't.
Don
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
<aside>Wilderness, Yup! :) </aside>
I was visited by girafabot yesterday from the same IP.
The .de/ page you refer to has a redirect to your site on it. I have removed your domain name from the following to comply with the WebmasterWorld Terms of Service - We don't post our own URLs here to avoid being flooded with commercial "URL drops" (see bottom of your screen):
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.yourdomain.org">
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
</BODY>
</HTML>
You can see this code using the Opera browser with "Automatic Redirects" disabled.
Girafa provides graphic snapshots of Web site homepages for use by MSN search and possibly others. It takes a "picture" of your home page and displays it as a thumbnail alongside search results.
This access to your site was originally directed to the .de domain and then was forwarded to your .org domain by the code on the .de/ page. You might want to look up the owner of the .de domain and see if the name rings a bell. Otherwise, it could be an admirer or a detractor. Girafabot just visited your home page and did its snapshot thing, probably.
Hope this helps,
Jim
Jim,
I didn't quite understand what you said about removed my url..?
Do you mean that I need to edit out the parts in my post where I was naming my Husband's home site?
vmcc
Yes, in order to comply with the TOS, everybody here seems to have registered "mydomain.com" as their domain name, and we all sell widgets - although there are blue, red, green, and fuzzy variants... ;)
Slack is granted for first-time posts, though. Zap the URL if you can - there is a time limit on editing your own posts.
The TOS keeps this place from being overrun by folks whose only purpose is to drop their URL and go. And it works very nicely, keeping WebmasterWorld a very useful, low-noise place.
Jim
Oh, ok Thanks!
vmcc
Been a while. Just had a question for Jum- you ban or allow girafabot- I was not clear...
thanks!
dave
Some Webmaster's with proprietary content on their home pages object to Girafa "copying" those images, but because of the nature of my sites, I have no objection.
I did have a problem with them initially, because during post-development testing, they came in with a blank or plain-browser UA (IIRC) and loaded my home page several times without doing anything else, which raised my suspicions. However, when I contacted them, they responded immediately, explained what they were doing, and added contact info to the UA within days. Normally, I haven't had that good of an outcome except for a couple of university project 'bots whose admins I contacted about respecting robots.txt and having their 'bots identify themselves properly.
Anyway, it could be useful for marketing purposes, a problem due to proprietary-content issues, or not worth enough to you to bother with one way or the other, depending on your website, its purpose, and target audience.
Jim
I was thinking that, too. I DO want my homepage to show up on those search engines and such that have thumbnails. But I thought you were implying you banned it. And, usually, I am much less conservative than you!
Anyway, thanks for clearing that up!
dave
