A summary of the um-IC Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the um-IC 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 um-IC 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 144.76.94.113 - - [29/Apr/2019:10:54:12 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 323 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; um-IC/1.0; mailto: techinfo@ubermetrics-technologies.com; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.1"
HTTP User Agent
um-IC/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 144.76.94.113.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 144.76.94.96 – 144.76.94.127 |
| netname: | HETZNER-fsn1-dc10 |
| org-name: | Hetzner Online GmbH |
| address: | Industriestrasse 25 |
| address: | D-91710 Gunzenhausen |
| address: | GERMANY |
| last-modified: | 2016-08-25T13:26:09Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Hetzner Online GmbH.
Owner
Ubermetrics
Country
Germany
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website ubermetrics-technologies.com.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Ubermetrics 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 um-IC from visiting your site
User-agent: um-IC Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of um-IC 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: um-IC 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
Ubermetrics provides media monitoring: online, TV and radio, helping to monitor and measure conversion volume and conversation. Utilising the Content Intelligence platform digital communicators have data and insights to make for effective campaigns.
