SBIder - a robot you don't want on your sites
There are robots crawling the Internet, which you don't want on your site.
One of them is the robot "SBIder" from sitesell.com. Sitesell provides an online service to built optimised web sites using robots (spiders) to crawl competitor web sites. The purpose is to analyse top ranking web sites in order to find out what they are doing to be on the top of the search engines. Basically it is about checking out the competition.
As this is something most likely every successful webmaster has to do (check out the competition), I personally do not like the fact that it is done automatically. Others may disagree with me.
We have pretty good rankings for a lot of our clients web sites. They paid good money for our work and research. In the last few days I found the robot "SBIder" in the log files of the most successful web sites. Checking it out I found sitesell.com and the following IP address range: 64.34.145.194 - 64.34.145.207. IP addresses may change over time and you should do a whois query on the IP address to get the latest data, when you find SBIder in your server logs.
To secure our clients advantage we just blocked the IP range with the servers firewall. I don't give it any chance that somebody using that kind of software is analysing and copying our work to compete against our clients.
Recently we found that they use also a different userAgent and other IP addresses:
userAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)
IP addresses: 66.43.57.8, 66.43.57.145, 66.43.57.44
They own this IP addresses: 66.43.48.0 - 66.43.63.255
OrgName: SiteSell Inc.
OrgId: SITES-1
Address: PO Box 55071
Address: CP Mackay
City: Montreal
StateProv: QC
PostalCode: H3G-1S0
Country: CA
RegDate: 2003-09-12
Updated: 2007-03-15
If you know of similar robots, please let us know.
Disclaimer - This newsletter is a free service providing information only. While we use reasonable care to see that this information is correct, we do not guarantee it for accuracy, completeness or fitness for a particular purpose. The Virtual Workforce Company Ltd. shall not be liable for damages of any kind in connection with the use or misuse of this information.
Bookmark this page by using: