the return of spbot

continuing the spbot / seoprofiler discussion

[lucy24]

What are the odds that two completely unrelated robots would be using the same IP address?

from: 174.129.117.216
time: 8/Apr 12:55:32 (PST)
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/20121223 Ubuntu/9.25 (jaunty) Firefox/3.8

Asked for robots.txt, swung by main page (which is boring to most robots), went away.

Hm.

[wilderness]

Coincidences hardly happen when the IP range comes from a server farm [webmasterworld.com]

Pfui been building this long thread just for your benefit.

Welcome to Webmaster World.

[dstiles]

Lucy, the UA is ordinary Firefox run on a Ubuntu desktop.

Except as far as I know there isn't a version 9.25 (although there may be).

The IP is Amazon AWS - a notorious bot farm - so it is almost certainly, as Wilderness says, a bad bot. In which case the UA can and probably does change: stealth bots do this a lot whereas "real" bots are more honest (although most are probably of no more use).

There is a (very long) thread about Amazon AWS in this forum: get all the IP ranges it mentions and block them all. They serve no useful purpose to humanity.