A summary of the Exabot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the Exabot 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 Exabot 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 178.255.215.95 - - [19/Apr/2019:19:42:05 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 323 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0; +http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)"
HTTP User Agent
Exabot/3.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 178.255.215.95.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 178.255.208.0 – 178.255.215.255 |
| netname: | FR-DASSAULT-20100714 |
| org-name: | OVH-DEDICATED-FO |
| address: | 10 rue Marcel Dassault CS 40501 |
| address: | 78946 |
| address: | VELIZY VILLACOUBLAY CEDEX |
| address: | FRANCE |
| last-modified: | 2016-11-07T13:16:54Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to OVH.
Owner
Exalead
Country
France
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://www.exabot.com/go/robot.
At the time of reviewing the website was showing a 403 error. Searching for more information it was found that the Exalead website had reference to the Exabot robot with details about its operation.
https://www.exalead.com/search/webmasterguide
The above website page confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Exabot 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 Exabot from visiting your site
User-agent: Exabot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of Exabot 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: Exabot Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example 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
Exalead is an Internet search engine. It offers two types of search results:
- Web search: providing information in different formats, for example: web sites; Word documents; .pdf files
- Image search: targetting photographs, illustrations and icons
If you would like to learn more they have an FAQ page with further information.
