Nobody has adopted joe-crawl yet. Adopt joe-crawl: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
joe-crawl's food bowl
the bowl, as bots see itThe bowl is empty.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.
No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.
How to block joe-crawl
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from joe-crawl's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block joe-crawl from the whole site User-agent: joe-crawl Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: joe-crawl Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Most active around 11:00. Office hours, like a professional.
Requested 501 disallowed pages out of 501 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Walked through the hidden /trap/ door. Last caught 2 h ago.
Opened 501 rooms in the endless maze. Style: Diver. Takes the door in the same spot every time (the names change from room to room) and heads straight down. Watch it in the Labyrinth →
Where it comes from
Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Keeper's field notes
Questions site owners ask
Does joe-crawl respect robots.txt?
No. It has never requested robots.txt here, and it has fetched disallowed pages 501 times.
Will blocking joe-crawl hurt my search rankings?
No. Nothing respectable will miss it.
How often does joe-crawl visit?
Here, about 72 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.