Search Engines: January 2008 Archives
I've seen a few posts from people on forums over the last few weeks complaining that GoogleBot is misbehaving and chewing up silly amounts of bandwidth.
Unfortunately it's all too easy to pretend to be GoogleBot (or any other bot for that matter) simply by spoofing the UserAgent string ie. telling the world that you are something that you aren't.
So how can you tell if a bot really is from Google?
One of the official Google blogs has the answer - DNS lookups:
Basically you need to check that the forward and reverse DNS entries are valid ie. that the A and PTR records are from Google...
That's a bit of a pain, but will save you headaches if you're seeing strange activity in your logs...
Unfortunately it's all too easy to pretend to be GoogleBot (or any other bot for that matter) simply by spoofing the UserAgent string ie. telling the world that you are something that you aren't.
So how can you tell if a bot really is from Google?
One of the official Google blogs has the answer - DNS lookups:
Basically you need to check that the forward and reverse DNS entries are valid ie. that the A and PTR records are from Google...
That's a bit of a pain, but will save you headaches if you're seeing strange activity in your logs...
Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox support extensions which add functionality to the browser.
Personally I prefer Firefox and since I don't use Windows that much I don't have the option of using IE7 that often.
One of the more interesting extensions that I've come across recently is called SEO Quake.
The plugin is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer and gives a webmaster, marketer or SEO access to a wealth of information about the sites you are visiting, search engine results and whole lot more.
For a full range of features and an explanation of how they work have a look at the article on the developer's site
Personally I prefer Firefox and since I don't use Windows that much I don't have the option of using IE7 that often.
One of the more interesting extensions that I've come across recently is called SEO Quake.
The plugin is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer and gives a webmaster, marketer or SEO access to a wealth of information about the sites you are visiting, search engine results and whole lot more.
For a full range of features and an explanation of how they work have a look at the article on the developer's site
