A summary of the DotBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the DotBot robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the DotBot web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 216.244.66.200 - - [26/Apr/2019:01:02:45 +0100] "GET /error-object-reference-not-set/ HTTP/1.1" 200 29351 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)"
HTTP User Agent
DotBot/1.1
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 216.244.66.200.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 216.244.64.0 – 216.244.95.255 |
| NetName: | WOW-IPV4-NET3 |
| OrgName: | Wowrack.com |
| Address: | 12201 Tukwila International Blvd |
| Address: | STE 100 |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| PostalCode: | 98168 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2018-05-31 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Wowrack.
nslookup DNS command gives
** server can’t find 200.66.244.216.in-addr.arpa: NXDOMAIN
Owner
Moz, a website SEO company.
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The ahrefs website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1.
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent DotBot from visiting your site
User-agent: dotbot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of DotBot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: dotbot Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example, taken from their website the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Whilst the site log gives the reference to the robot as http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot this redirects to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/dotbot.
Moz uses the DotBot to crawl the Internet to gather data for the Moz Link Index. The collected data is made available through their Moz Pro campaign, Link Explorer and the Moz Links API.
Data collected by DotBot is used in calculating authority metrics.
