Help, how do I stop Looksmart from spidering my site?

[smn2]

Hi,

Just checked stats for one of my sites to find that
sv-crawl . looksmart . com and cougar . dnsmaster . net
have spidered my site and used bandwidth to the tune of
3GB in 2 days!!!

What do I have to put in my robots.txt file to ban these
critters from my site?

Help, please!

(My overage starts at 2GB for the month!)

Steve

[mxp]

You could try (if you havent already) denying access to all spiders and then overwriting that command for the spiders you do want to access your site.

Something like

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

would allow Googlebot to spider your whole site and should in theory keep all other spiders out. (of course that depends on whether the spider obey robots.txt or not)

hope this helps
mxp

[Paul Wright]

I'm not 100% percent on this but i don't think LookSmart has a UA.

If you're on an apache server then you also add this to your .htacess file which bans all users without a user agent.

SetEnvIf User-Agent ^$ keep_out
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=keep_out

Have you contacted your host for advice about this? They should be able to help as i'm sure you're not the first.

[smn2]

Hi,

I do want to disallow (if that will work) and tried
User-agent: MantraAgent

and it seems to have worked.

I will also contact Skymarket directly - tis costing
me a bomb, right now!

Cheers, guys!

Steve

[smn2]

Hi

Paul, or anyone who knows, what's the worst that could happen
if I do what you suggest, namely: put

SetEnvIf User-Agent ^$ keep_out
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=keep_out

in my .htaccess file.

My bandwidth is too high again, and think it's because of
spiders not obeying the robots.txt file I've got.

This whole spider business is starting to become a big problem
- one that could do with me getting to grips with how it all
works (or maybe I should just get a dedicated host and
not bother about high bandwidth usage )

Cheers,
Steve

[Itchy]

Try a big mallet they squish em good .... failing that use google for the bot list then add it to your robots.txt as well as ya ht access file that should stop em.... but robots donot have to listen to what youve said so they can still goto all links etc if they choose to.

[futureweb]

you could also

drop a small bit of code into the top of your page

<%
Function isSpider()
	' Well, normally the browser isn't a spider...
	isSpider = 0
	' No other meaning than forcing the isSpider behaviour
	' for testing pourpose
	if request("spider") = 1 then isSpider = 1
	' Takes the name of the UserAgent currently used and put it
	' into lower case for compairson
	agent = lcase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT"))
	' Now, most of the Bots refers to themself as libwww,
	' java, perl, crawl, bot. let's start with some conditions
	' If the agent contains "bot" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "bot")  > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "perl" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "perl") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "java" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "java") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "libw" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "libw") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "crawl" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "crawl") > 0 then isSpider = 1
end function

if IsSpider = 1 then

if agent = "what ever the bot is called" then
' redirect away
response.redirect("http://www.google.com") ' should keep it busy 
end if

end if
%>

[futureweb]

you could also

drop a small bit of code into the top of your page

Function isSpider()
	' Well, normally the browser isn't a spider...
	isSpider = 0
	' No other meaning than forcing the isSpider behaviour
	' for testing pourpose
	if request("spider") = 1 then isSpider = 1
	' Takes the name of the UserAgent currently used and put it
	' into lower case for compairson
	agent = lcase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT"))
	' Now, most of the Bots refers to themself as libwww,
	' java, perl, crawl, bot. let's start with some conditions
	' If the agent contains "bot" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "bot")  > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "perl" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "perl") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "java" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "java") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "libw" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "libw") > 0 then isSpider = 1
	' If the agent contains "crawl" then it is a Spider
	if instr(agent, "crawl") > 0 then isSpider = 1
end function

if IsSpider = 1 then

if agent = "what ever the bot is called" then
' redirect away
response.redirect("http://www.google.com") ' should keep it busy 
end if

end if