Heavy spidering from ICANN

206.196.54.148

[contracosta]

Last month 35% of my traffic came from this IP. UA reported at NT 5.1 / MSIE 6.0. The hits are definitely from a spider-bot.

Wonder why the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is running so aggressive a spider? Anyone else catch this one?

[wilderness]

Welcome to Webmaster World.

This IP range you've provided is an ISP in Kansas.

[GeorgeGG]

ISP in Kansas

The ISP also has an address in Burnsville,
which is just south of Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN.

GeorgeGG

[contracosta]

Hmmm, so I was wrong. An ISP huh? Weird. Strange for an ISP to do this -- what would be the purpose? I am confused! It's going to mess up my stats -- should I block this IP?

[wilderness]

should I block this IP?

It has to be your choice entirely. Only you know the content of your site and it's visitors patterns.

If you only had 100 visitors in a month that 35% might just be somebody interested in your sites.
If you had 1000 and upwards than 35% is a substantial number.

What ever this visitors intent was? Has already been accomplished. There's no way of knowing what their intent in gathering your pages is/was. You can speculate on you log patterns at best.

Was "NT 5.1 / MSIE 6.0" the entire UA?

[contracosta]

Could this be somebody with that nasty pre-download option turned on? That would be really wicked. Was definitely not a person actually requesting the files because they came in bursts of 20-25 / second. Nobody could manually nagivate that fast. Some of the pages gathered in these bursts don't even directly links to this. Maybe it's Keanu on Matrix-speed!

Hmmm... I looked more at the UA strings and there is both MSIE 5.5 and 6.0 listed, and both XP and Windows 98. Still don't know what to make of it.