Yahoo/Overture/Alltheweb

Spider not honoring "robots.txt"

[herb]

Just found ATW crawling through a spider banned forum. Grabbed the entire forum

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /forum

66.77.73.32 - - [01/Mar/2004:12:30:03 -0700] "GET /forum/viewforum.php?f=3& HTTP/1.0" 200 18718 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; htXp://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"

[Rumbas]

That's odd herb. Are you sure your robots.txt is valid?

[searchengineworld.com...]

Otherwise try disallowing user-agent: slurp

[marcs]

How old is your robots.txt file?

Maybe the bot isn't aware of the new restrictions yet...

[herb]

"That's odd herb. Are you sure your robots.txt is valid?"

The robots file is and has been valid.

Ink has spidered the site ignoring the restricted areas for the past year. This just started two days ago.

Yesterday it was visiting about once an hour and grabbing only the forums.

Received a message from the folks at Yahoo and they are reviewing the situation.

[Rumbas]

Glad to hear somebody's on it for you herb. Let's know how it went.