Yahoo under Linux UA

[Staffa]

I found this older thread ( [webmasterworld.com...] ) but today Yahoo was trying to visit with UA
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

coming from the 64.157.4.nnn range and no robots.txt request.

Anyone have an idea what the purpose of this camouflage crawling is ?

[edited by: incrediBILL at 11:17 pm (utc) on June 19, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[Samizdata]

I sometimes see Google IPs doing this kind of thing and assume it is quality control.

The search engines have to check that you are not cloaking to their bots somehow.

As long as it really is from Yahoo there should be nothing to worry about.

...

[Staffa]

Thanks, Samizdata
I don't cloak to SE bots but if they cloak their bot then the bot gets what any other coming in without referrer gets ;o)

[wilderness]

Anyone have an idea what the purpose of this camouflage crawling is ?

Bill provided one answer in the thread you referenced.

I sometimes see Google IPs doing this kind of thing and assume it is quality control.

As does MSN, Jeeves and perhaps a few others.

Don