iisbot

A DIY crawler?

[dstiles]

This one coming from dynamic IPs, currently t-mobile but could be from anywhere. Seems to give up after a couple of 403's.

iisbot/1.0 (+http://www.iis.net/iisbot.html)

Online info suggests it's an SEO tool for checking one's own site rather than a real bot but since it's hitting MY site...

These SEO tools are beginning to really annoy me.

[jdMorgan]

If it's a backlink checker or has that as one of its functions, be careful. The other site owner may think your site is dead, and remove your back-link.

This is always a challenging problem, because the IP address you see in your log is often the linking site owner's "personal" ISP IP address, and not that of his server.

This is one good reason that a clear and descriptive 403 page is important -- but we have no way to know if the link-checking site owner will actually read it. And it's a good reason to contact the owners of the most important sites that link to you, and explain up-front that their link checkers may not work on your site, and that any apparently-dead sites should be checked by hand before their link is removed.

Jim

[dstiles]

I accept your viewpoint, Jim, but since, with rare exceptions, I do not actively seek links to sites, that is their problem not mine. If they have that many links to trace I have no interest in them.

Link checkers as such I'm not worried about anyway: they hit once and go away again. The SEO ones tend to be "grab-it-alls" and those I do not want.

I see quite a few pseudo-bots and since none of them state who they are in any detail they could be people cadging links or they could be (and I think more often are) scraping to see what they can find.

In general, unless they are known evil or real bots that have no business doing something specific, they get a 403 with enough info that they can track me down if they need to. None of this class of "bots" ever do.

An iisbot web site I looked at states that it is for optimizing one's own site. My site ain't theirs.