Blocking Alexa Toolbar

How do I block folks from using this?

[pendanticist]

How can I prevent folks from downloading my site?

Wouldn't be so bad, but they come in, unthrottled, and harvest my domain much too quickly for my liking. In fact, I don't like them even using the toolbar to dl anything.

How can I block it?

Thanks.

[pendanticist]

...

[Jackal]

Pendanticist,

Try going to the discussions for Robots.txt. I saw some information in there about this and although I am new to this website I have already found some excellent areas to learn from. I have also found this excellent link that was provided by a moderator that outlines a lot of other useful information. Good luck! Let me know how it goes so I can do the same thing! I am interested in preventing this same problem on my websites. Thanks. :)

Jackal

[google.com...]

[wildfiction]

I'm a bit confused why you would want to do this? I would say that you would want to do exactly the oposite of this. In fact, I would, if I could work out how to write the code, issue a 'visit ping' to the alexa web info collector each time somebody visited my web site. That would boost my traffic ranking on the Alexa web site. Isn't that what you want?

Or am I missing the point?

[pendanticist]

Hey, I don't mind the traffic. I do draw the line at downloading my entire site, file after file until nothing is left to take. And, they do it 'rapidly'.

For what it's worth, the most I ever get via Alexa has been the comparison page which only gives the viewer a 'similar in content' site.

Alexa is sooo far down the list of referring sites, I pay it no mind atall....

Hell, I get more traffic from mywebsearch than Alexa.

[wildfiction]

Isn't Alexa useful for comparing your site to your competitors to see how much traffic they are getting compared to you? Or is there a better way to do it than that?

If someone was trying to sell me advertising space on their web, the first thing I would do would be to go to Alexa to see how much traffic they got...

[pendanticist]

I'm speaking about the toolbar, not Alexa's services.

Like this: (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Alexa Toolbar)

[wildfiction]

Now I'm confused. Does that mean that the Alexa Toolbar is downloading your site? Or are Alexa indexing your site and thereby downloading all the pages to index? How can you tell from that text string that it's the Alexa Toolbar that's doing all of this?

[larryhatch]

I see those all the time.

I presumed it was some ordinary visitor who happened
to have his Alexa Toolbar activated while he was browsing.

Am I missing something here? -Larry

[keyplyr]

I presumed it was some ordinary visitor who happened to have his Alexa Toolbar activated while he was browsing.

Yes. The Alexa Toolbar, in itself, is not a site grabber.

However Pendanticist, if you want to block everyone using it, a rewrite via .htaccess would probably do it (on an Apache server) if that user agent is always present:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Alexa\ Toolbar
RewriteRule .* - [F]

[clearvision]

Question:

Why would you use the Alexa toolbar to compare your site to others...it only counts visits from people who actually have the toolbar and is not an accurate unit of measure.

So if your visitors are mostly finding you through search engines and don't know about Alexa toolbar, your stats will appear lower than say a competitor business site who's visitors "believe" and have the Alexatoolbar.

Definitely not an accurate way to track true rankings.

Sorry to go off topic...my 2 cents ;)

[pendanticist]

Let's put it this way. Of all my Alexa Toolbar users, the vast, vast majority are site rapers. You do the math. By whatever methodology they may be using, it is clear they are scraping my site.

[wildfiction]

clearvision: It's like the Nielson TV ratings (is that what they call them?). There are very few people with Nielson boxes but they multiply that out as a representative proportion of the nation.

[Rosalind]

Perhaps it's a faked UA, and the these visitors may not even be using the toolbar? It may be more useful to block by IP address. But do you know which countries these requests are coming from?