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A few months ago I wrote to Dez (who puts his email address in the UA), very politely asking why his bot never looks at robots.txt but have never had a reply or acknowledgment.
Today, after seeing heaps more 404 errors in the stats, I visited the site and did a quick search for our client's company name. It is pretty unique, only one other company in the whole world uses it and they copied from us.
Anyway, WebSearch.COM.AU returned a bunch of garbage results, none of which contained the company name nor even closely related, and half of which were in German!
So, I have now finally got fed up with the rude behaviour and banned the bot using .htaccess. I can't see any point in wasting bandwidth on something that can't even return decent search results from a bot that lobs in every month or two, scattering 404s like they are going out of fashion. I have never seen even one referral from them either.
I gave them a lengthy chance as they are Australian, and I like to support a local product, but they are not supporting us in return.
Does anyone else have any experience with this mob?
I checked guestimate traffic (estimates based on ISP proxy traffic simmilar to hitwise etc) and according to them the site is only doing around 52,000 visits / month...
Mind you the guestimate traffic can be off by quite a bit...
[edited by: bill at 4:11 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2005]
[edit reason] removed URLs [/edit]
