A summary of the ZoominfoBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the ZoominfoBot 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 ZoominfoBot 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 35.237.182.109 - - [24/Mar/2019:15:09:43 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 117 "-" "ZoominfoBot (zoominfobot at zoominfo dot com)"
HTTP User Agent
ZoominfoBot
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 35.237.182.109.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 35.208.0.0 – 35.247.255.255 |
| OrgName: | GOOGLE-CLOUD |
| Address: | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway |
| City: | Mountain View |
| StateProv: | CA |
| PostalCode: | 94043 |
| Country: | US |
| last-modified: | 2014-09-05T10:47:15Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Google cloud services.
Owner
Zoom Information Inc.
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://www.zoominfo.com/
The referenced website does not confirm whether the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Zoom Information website provides no 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 not given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
You may wish to trial the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent ZoominfoBot from visiting your site
User-agent: ZoominfoBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of ZoominfoBot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests trial the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: ZoominfoBot 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
Zoom Information Inc’s service relates contacts and companies using their B2B contact database.
With their technology, integrations, and automation a business can find and connect with its ideal customer. See improvements at each phase of the go-to-market: lead gen; sales; and revenue goals.
They have available an intelligent browser plugin which can be used to access contact and company data from within LinkedIn profiles, corporate websites, or Salesforce.
The suggestion is to integrate their date and technology with your existing workflows to improve productivity. There are a number of integrations available including:
- Hubspot
- eloqua
- outreach
- Marketo
- Sales Loft
- Microsoft Office 365
- SalesForce
