Sitemaps.xml

Single requests, various IPs

[Umbra]

This month, started seeing daily requests for sitemap.xml. Never any referer and comes from various IPs and UAs, looks like residential IPs (not from Google et al). They're single hits with no other activity from the same IP. Is anyone else seeing this? I don't know if this a toolbar or browser plugin or botnet or hackers working from home.

[Samizdata]

I see these occasionally (I had one today from Thailand) and always assumed they were from botnet zombies or chancers trying to collect an easy (and well-formed) list of potential targets - having a file named "sitemap.xml" pointing to things like "mailform", "guestbook", "wordpress" or "joomla" is something of an invitation, and I wouldn't recommend it.

Last year's thread: [webmasterworld.com...]