A summary of the IDG/UK Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the IDG/UK 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 IDG/UK 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 34.245.193.5 - - [23/Mar/2019:06:57:14 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 117 "-" "IDG/UK (http://spaziodati.eu/)"
HTTP User Agent
IDG/UK
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 34.245.193.5.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 34.240.0.0 – 34.247.255.255 |
| NetName: | AMAZON-DUB |
| Organization: | Amazon Data Services Ireland Limited |
| Address: | Unit 4033, Citywest Avenue Citywest Business Park |
| City: | Dublin |
| StateProv:: | D24 |
| PostalCode: | |
| Country: | IE |
| Updated: | 2014-07-18 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc.
Owner
SpazioDati S.r.l.
Country
Italy
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://spaziodati.eu/.
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 IDG/UK from visiting your site
User-agent: IDG/UK Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of IDG/UK 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: IDG/UK 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
Spaziodati is using big data, together with semantic web technologies to build a high quality knowledge graph, which is made available via APIs.
Using this data the company offers:
- Atoka – B2B lead generation of companies and individuals
- Dandelion API – a named entity extraction API which works on very short and unstructured texts.
- Services (enterprise data solutions) – working with customers to make better use of big data.
