A summary of the XoviBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the XoviBot 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 XoviBot 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 78.138.117.4 - - [09/Apr/2019:06:47:39 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 44460 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; XoviBot/2.0; +http://www.xovibot.net/)"
HTTP User Agent
XoviBot/2.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 78.138.117.4.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 78.138.108.0 – 78.138.117.255 |
| netname: | DE-OPENIT-20070611 |
| org-name: | PlusServer GmbH |
| address: | Hohenzollernring 72 |
| address: | 50672 |
| address: | Koeln |
| address: | GERMANY |
| last-modified: | 2018-10-18T07:57:20Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to PlusServer.
nslookup DNS command gives
** server can’t find 4.117.138.78.in-addr.arpa: NXDOMAIN
Owner
XOVI GmbH
Country
Germany
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://www.xovibot.net/.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The XobiBot 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 XobiBot from visiting your site
User-agent: XobiBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of XobiBot 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: XobiBot Crawl-Delay: 5
In this example, taken from their website the delay has been set to 5 seconds. The maximum configurable delay is given as 20 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
Xovi provides an SEO and social monitoring service. With its tools Xovi can analyse Google’s data about a website, presenting it in a clear and concise way.
Shown on the Xovi website are services which you would expect, these include:
- Link manager
- Search analytics
- Social analytics
- Keywords
- Monitoring
- Disavow tool
