A summary of the YaK Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the YaK 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 YaK 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 142.44.245.88 - - [20/Apr/2019:11:01:32 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 117 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YaK/1.0; http://linkfluence.com/; bot@linkfluence.com)"
HTTP User Agent
YaK/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 142.44.245.88.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 142.44.128.0 – 142.44.255.255 |
| NetName: | HO-2 |
| NetType: | Direct Allocation |
| Organization: | OVH Hosting, Inc. (HO-2) |
| Updated: | 2017-06-21 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to OVH.
nslookup DNS command gives
** server can’t find 88.245.44.142.in-addr.arpa: NXDOMAIN
Owner
Linkfluence
Country
France
Exclusion
The user-agent string doesn’t include a reference to a specific robot details page. The included reference is to http://linkfluence.com/.
It is not confirmed whether the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
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.
Generally for a web robot which supports the exclusion standard the observed user-agent is included in the entries in the robots.txt file. On this basis illustrated below is an example to prevent YaK from visiting your site
User-agent: YaK Disallow: /
Shown below is the corresponding entry to control the frequency of YaK visiting your site, defining a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests
User-agent: YaK Crawl-Delay: 5
In this example the delay has been set to 5 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
Linkfluence state their mission as
Combining artificial intelligence and human expertise to turn social data into valuable insights
The company’s software, called Radarly and Search, are used to track and analyse online sources to provide brands with consumer insights.
The company website shows it to offer the following solutions:
- Brand equity tracking
- Trend detection
- Tribe tracking
- Campaign performance
- Online reputation
- Influencer discovery and measurement
