A summary of the PagePeeker Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the PagePeeker 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 PagePeeker 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
www.vntweb.co.uk 94.130.238.229 - - [25/Nov/2021:12:25:41 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 168 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36 (compatible; PagePeeker/3.0; +https://pagepeeker.com/robots/)"
HTTP User Agent
PagePeeker/3.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 94.130.238.229.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 94.130.238.192 – 94.130.238.255 |
| netname: | HETZNER-fsn1-dc4 |
| descr | Hetzner Online GmbH |
| descr | Datacenter fsn1-dc4 |
| address: | Industriestrasse 25 |
| aAddress | D-91710 |
| address: | Gunzenhausen |
| address: | GERMANY |
| last-modified: | 2018-03-15T14:11:32Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Hetzner Online GmbH.
Owner
PagePeeker SRL
Country
Romania
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://pagepeeker.com/robots/
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text but doesn’t cover the crawl delay.
The PagePeeker 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 preventing the robot from indexing the website but no mention about how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent PagePeeker from visiting your site
User-agent: PagePeeker Disallow: /
You may wish to trial controlling the frequency of PagePeeker 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: PagePeeker 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
PagePeeker provides a website thumbnailing service. Taking screenshots of website on behalf of their clients. The image can then be used to illustrate the link generating more traffic to your website.
