Omni spam
Dirk found that the Omniexplorer bot IP addresses suddenly emanated referrer spam, and investigated.
I thought I’d explore the areas he hadn’t covered yet.
I found more domains on the IP addresses mentioned. One of the domains was used in a December 2004 guestbook spam run. I’m sure I’ll find more with time.
I also found that Google had blocked a significant number of the domains. The spam run now is for domains they’ve spammed before. Maybe they think they’ll be able to force them into Google? Sorry, that’s a lost cause. They’re not going to relax those bans!
The only thing they can hope for is direct clicks and placement in MSN and Yahoo.
The payoff is a porn network, not sure which (probably adultprovide). The affiliate ID is:
promote
July 18th, 2006 at 11:10 am
We are having problems with the OmniExplorer ignoring robots.txt instructions to leave portions of our site alone. These are automotive sites and the vehicle configuration pages are NOT designed for spiders.
Our only choice has been to block the IP addresses. Today the spider came from IP: 64.62.145.101
This block containg this one is currently shown registered to:
CustName: Energy Group, Inc.
Address: P.O. Box 693
City: Southeastern
StateProv: PA
PostalCode: 19399
RTechName: Hurricane Electric
RTechPhone: +1-510-580-4100
RTechEmail: hostmaster@he.net
Since these people are changing IP addresses to try and stay ahead of us, I immediately blocked the entire block of addresses.
Previously I tried blocking individual addresses. But, within a few hours they would be back from the next IP in the block.
Originally their tech support advised me that it was an older spider that was causing the problem. The version I am having a problem with today is: OmniExplorer_Bot/6.64.
I email OmniExplorer copies of my complains to the ISP providing the IP’s but otherwise I see no point in talking to them. I feel they have lied to be about the purpose for spidering the sites.
Thanks for posting your findings. I include references to this and other sites in my complaints.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:24 am
You should remember one thing Alan:
OmniBot has previously been associated with a search engine for car classifieds. So if you’ve got car classifieds, you’ve possibly got a site within their interest. I don’t know if it would be advantageous to you to allow them or not. You’d have to figure out which site they’re actually spidering for, since they don’t tell us.