Sunday, November 23, 2008

Is this Spam 2.0 ?

For the past week or so I have gotten two requests from people who want to guest blog even though they really did not have much expertise on the subject areas covered here, except if you consider that I write entries on Health/Medical/Fitness. I have also noticed an increased amount of traffic from two IP addresses:





As you can see, the number of visits are not affected but the number of pageviews are. These two IP addresses and the bots behind them are behaving quite differently.

The first bot comes from: 
208.111.154.249 (Limelight Networks Inc) 
and it is based in Tempe, Arizona but sometimes it is doing the same thing from an IP near D.C. The bot seems to go to only one address:


It is baffling. If it were intelligent, one would expect it to go beyond that address but it doesn't as if it were expecting a new item for this posting. The bot comes back several times a day (maybe five to ten times a day). Yesterday, it came at the following hours:

06:14:31
07:43:29
09:41:12
12:28:30
14:01:02
16:00:41

The second bot is the one causing this past week's spike in page views. The bot's IP is:

80.56.211.#  or  f211087.upc-f.chello.nl (Cpe Customers Nl) in Zuid-holland, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The bot comes back every 65 seconds for periods of hours and goes to the main blog address. If you are using a bot to check on any new item on this blog, please change its setting to do so only once or twice a day (like the one I use), not a thousand times. Then again, I am expecting it to be a spam bot. 

But what is the purpose of these spam bots ? I don't get it.

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