Is there a whitelist of the RogerBot IP Addresses?
-
I'm all for letting Roger crawl my site, but it's not uncommon for malicious spiders to spoof the User-Agent string. Having a whitelist of Roger's IP addresses would be immensely useful!
-
Samantha (of the Moz team) suggested I have my client whitelist Rogerbot - so you are saying simply whitelist Rogerbot as a useragent? Is there any other information I need to provide?
-
Gotcha thanks for the response, Aaron.
-
Hey Kalen! Rogerbot is the crawler we use to gather data on websites for Moz Analytics and the Mozscape link index. Here's his info: http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-.
I wish I could give you IP addresses, but they change all the time since we host Roger in the cloud. There's not even a reliable range of IPs to give you. You can totally whitelist the useragent rogerbot, but that's the only reliable information about the crawler you can go off of. I hope that helps but let me know if there's any other solution you can think of. Thank you!
-
Hi Aaron,
I'm not totally sure what RogerBot is, but I was also interested in a list of IPs to white list. We just completed a search crawl and are checking out the Crawl Diagnostics. It's hit some 503 errors b/c it's triggering our DoS filter.
Is there a way to get the IP addresses behind this crawl in order to white list them?
Thanks,
Kalen -
Hey there Outside!
I totally understand your concerns, but unfortunately we don't have a static IP we can give you for Rogerbot. He's crawling from the cloud so his IP address changes all the time! As you know, you can allow him in Robots.txt but that's the only way to do it for now. We have a recent post about why this may be risky business: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Hope that helps!
-
Personally, I've run across spiders that search for entry points and exploits in common CMS, e-commerce, and CRM web applications. For example, there was a recent Wordpress bug that could be exploited to serve malicious content (read: virus) to visiting users.
Spoofing the User-Agent string is elementary at best, and wouldn't fool any sys admin worth a salt. All you have to do is a WHOIS on the requested IP to help identify it's origin.
I'm a bit of a data geek, so I like to grep through log files to see things that won't show up in Analytics that require Javascript.
-
Out of curiosity (and because I don't know), what is the advantage for a malicious spider to spoof the User-Agent string? I mean, I understand this hides its identity, but why does a spider need to hide its identity? And what can a malicious spider do that a browsing human can't do? I haven't taken any action to prevent robots from anything on my site. Should I?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Rogerbot blocked by cloudflare and not display full user agent string.
Hi, We're trying to get MOZ to crawl our site, but when we Create Your Campaign we get the error:
Moz Pro | | BB_NPG
Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL - please check to make sure it is correct. If the issue persists, check out this article for further help. robot.txt is fine and we actually see cloudflare is blocking it with block fight mode. We've added in some rules to allow rogerbot but these seem to be getting ignored. If we use a robot.txt test tool (https://technicalseo.com/tools/robots-txt/) with rogerbot as the user agent this get through fine and we can see our rule has allowed it. When viewing the cloudflare activity log (attached) it seems the Create Your Campaign is trying to crawl the site with the user agent as simply set as rogerbot 1.2 but the robot.txt testing tool uses the full user agent string rogerbot/1.0 (http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-, rogerbot-crawler+shiny@moz.com) albeit it's version 1.0. So seems as if cloudflare doesn't like the simple user agent. So is it correct the when MOZ is trying to crawl the site it uses the simple string of just rogerbot 1.2 now ? Thanks
Ben Cloudflare activity log, showing differences in user agent strings
2022-07-01_13-05-59.png0 -
Allow only Rogerbot, not googlebot nor undesired access
I'm in the middle of site development and wanted to start crawling my site with Rogerbot, but avoid googlebot or similar to crawl it. Actually mi site is protected with login (basic Joomla offline site, user and password required) so I thought that a good solution would be to remove that limitation and use .htaccess to protect with password for all users, except Rogerbot. Reading here and there, it seems that practice is not very recommended as it could lead to security holes - any other user could see allowed agents and emulate them. Ok, maybe it's necessary to be a hacker/cracker to get that info - or experienced developer - but was not able to get a clear information how to proceed in a secure way. The other solution was to continue using Joomla's access limitation for all, again, except Rogerbot. Still not sure how possible would that be. Mostly, my question is, how do you work on your site before wanting to be indexed from Google or similar, independently if you use or not some CMS? Is there some other way to perform it?
Moz Pro | | MilosMilcom
I would love to have my site ready and crawled before launching it and avoid fixing issues afterwards... Thanks in advance.0 -
Rogerbot did not crawl my site ! What might be the problem?
When I saw the new crawl for my site I wondered why there are no errors, no warning and 0 notices anymore. Then I saw that only 1 page was crawled. There are no Error Messages or webmasters Tools also did not report anything about crawling problems. What might be the problem? thanks for any tips!
Moz Pro | | inlinear
Holger rogerbot-did-not-crawl.PNG0 -
Should I be running my crawl on our www address or our non-www address?
I currently run our crawl on oursitename.com, but am wondering if it should be run on www.oursitename.com instead.
Moz Pro | | THMCC0 -
Rogerbot getting cheeky?
Hi SeoMoz, From time to time my server crashes during Rogerbot's crawling escapades, even though I have a robots.txt file with a crawl-delay 10, now just increased to 20. I looked at the Apache log and noticed Roger hitting me from from 4 different addresses 216.244.72.3, 72.11, 72.12 and 216.176.191.201, and most times whilst on each separate address, it was 10 seconds apart, ALL 4 addresses would hit 4 different pages simultaneously (example 2). At other times, it wasn't respecting robots.txt at all (see example 1 below). I wouldn't call this situation 'respecting the crawl-delay' entry in robots.txt as other question answered here by you have stated. 4 simultaneous page requests within 1 sec from Rogerbot is not what should be happening IMHO. example 1
Moz Pro | | BM7
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:54:27 +1000] "GET /store/product-info.php?mypage1.html" 200 77813
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:54:27 +1000] "GET /store/product-info.php?mypage2.html HTTP/1.1" 200 74058
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:54:28 +1000] "GET /store/product-info.php?mypage3.html HTTP/1.1" 200 69772
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:54:37 +1000] "GET /store/product-info.php?mypage4.html HTTP/1.1" 200 82441 example 2
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:15 +1000] "GET /store/mypage1.html HTTP/1.1" 200 70209
216.244.72.11 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:15 +1000] "GET /store/mypage2.html HTTP/1.1" 200 82384
216.244.72.12 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:15 +1000] "GET /store/mypage3.html HTTP/1.1" 200 83683
216.244.72.3 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:15 +1000] "GET /store/mypage4.html HTTP/1.1" 200 82431
216.244.72.3 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:16 +1000] "GET /store/mypage5.html HTTP/1.1" 200 82855
216.176.191.201 - - [05/Sep/2012:15:46:26 +1000] "GET /store/mypage6.html HTTP/1.1" 200 75659 Please advise.1 -
Is seomoz rogerbot only crawling the subdomains by links or as well by id?
I´m new at seomoz and just set up a first campaign. After the first crawling i got quite a few 404 errors due to deleted (spammy) forum threads. I was sure there are no links to these deleted threads so my question is weather the seomoz rogerbot is only crawling my subdomains by links or as well by ids (the forum thread ids are serially numbered from 1 to x). If the rogerbot crawls as well serially numbered ids do i have to be concerned by the 404 error on behalf of the googlebot as well?
Moz Pro | | sauspiel0 -
Rogerbot not showing in logs
Hi All Rogerbot has recently thrown up 403 errors for all our pages - no changes had been made to the site so I asked our ISP for assistance. They wanted to have a look at what rogerbot was doing and so went to the logs but rogerbot was not listed anywhere in the logs by name - any ideas why? Regards Craig
Moz Pro | | CraigWiltshire0 -
Blocking all robots except rogerbot
I'm in the process of working with a site under development and wish to run the SEOmoz crawl test before we launch it publicly. Unfortunately rogerbot is reluctant to crawl the site. I've set my robots.txt to disallow all bots besides rogerbot. Currently looks like this: User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: All pages within the site are meta tagged index,follow. Crawl report says: Search Engine blocked by robots.txt Yes Am I missing something here?
Moz Pro | | ignician0