A summary of the CCBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the CCBot 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 CCBot 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 54.226.175.101 - - [22/Mar/2019:01:49:13 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 117 "-" "CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)"
HTTP User Agent
CCBot/2.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 54.226.175.101.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 54.36.148.0 – 54.36.151.255 |
| org-name: | OVH-DEDICATED-FO |
| descr: | OVH SAS |
| address: | 2 rue Kellermann |
| address: | 59100 |
| address: | Roubaix |
| address: | FRANCE |
| last-modified: | 2014-09-05T10:47:15Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to OVH.
Owner
Common Crawl
Country
USA
Verification
The Common Crawl website confirms example uses of their robot user-agent string:
CCBot/2.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
The IP Addresses used are confirmed as previously 38.107.191.66 to 38.107.191.119, whilst now Amazon AWS is used.
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://commoncrawl.org/faq/.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay. It also advises that the robot crawler is based upon the Nutch project.
The Common Crawl 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 CCBot from visiting your site
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of CCBot 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: CCBot Crawl-Delay: 2
In this example, taken from their website the delay has been set to 2 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
The website details Common Crawl as a non-profit organisation whose aim is to create a copy of the Internet to be provided to internet researchers, companies and individuals for research and analysis.
