A summary of the CheckMarkNetwork Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the CheckMarkNetwork 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 CheckMarkNetwork 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 99.79.124.138 - - [30/Apr/2019:15:59:18 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 117 "-" "CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)"
HTTP User Agent
CheckMarkNetwork/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 99.79.124.138.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 99.78.128.0 – 99.82.191.255 |
| OrgName: | Amazon.com, Inc. |
| Address: | Amazon Web Services, Inc. |
| Address: | P.O. Box 81226 |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2018-09-19 |
| OrgNOCName: | Amazon AWS Network Operations |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon AWS Network Operations.
nslookup DNS command gives
138.124.79.99.in-addr.arpa name = ec2-99-79-124-138.ca-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com.
Owner
CheckMark Network
Country
USA
Verification
The CheckMark website confirms example uses of their robot user-agent string:
CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider-html/
The referenced website confirms that the bot follows the Googlebot specifications, respecting the configuration of the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The user agent is confirmed as
CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)
The CheckMarkNetwork 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 not given about preventing the robot from indexing the website or how to adjust its crawl rate.
If you wish to block the crawler from indexing a part of your website you may wish to try including the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent CheckMarkNetwork from visiting your site
User-agent: CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)
Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of CheckMarkNetwork visiting your site try setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+http://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html) Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
In the above examples I’ve taken the user-agent specified. But it’s likely that User-agent: CheckMarkNetwork can be used.
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
CheckMark Network provides brand protection.
The website highlights the following areas where the company provides on-line brand protection.
- Trademark Monitoring
- Internet Monitoring
- Domain Name Monitoring
- Mobile Apps Watch
- Social Media Watch
- Marketplace Watch
The company employs experienced trademark analysts around the world to provide a global coverage coupled with local expertise.
Read more about the company on their About Us page.
