User Agent fraud

googlebot ua

[David]

Is there a reason other than testing for cloaking that a spider would descise it self as googlebot. I have one being run at me now.

I couldn't figure out where to post this but I am curious about this.

[Bolotomus]

(I think "cloaking" is as good as place for any for this discussion.)

Here are some reasons I can think of:

1 - I posted a script here about a month ago that 'forged' its user_agent to see if other sites were using user_agent based cloaking. (I wonder if somebody is using it on you! LOL)

2 - If somebody wrote a nasty little email-sucking spider that ignored robots.txt and did all kind of ugly things, I bet they might want to pretend that they are some big spider as to not alert you. They don't usually call themselves 'Spambot version 0.8' you know.

3 - How do you know it's not Google? Maybe they have a new block of IPs you don't know about?

[David]

Thanks for the response..

I did a who is look up on the IP and its coming from a webhost/design/reseller company.

Your right I guess 'Spambot version 0.8' wouldn't be there best choice.. Kind of catchy though.