Two pretty dodgy things - googlebot spamming and wordpress footer viruses

In General on 26/10/2005 at 1:27 pm

So these are the things that have been getting my goat of late.

1. I reckon this has got to be someone pretending to be googlebot for some nasty reason or another… the net result is that I’ve had to use robots.txt to keep googlebot out - which is not something that I want to do but have to do as otherwise it’ll shut the site down.

2. I have to ‘fess up to being, on occasion, a pretty lazy technical blogger… basically I’ve been leaving some themes writeable by the server so that I can edit them through WordPress and not 644-ing them again… so some buggers ‘bot has gone and inserted viruses into the footer of each blog. This hasn’t impacted any edublogs, just individual installations. You’ve been warned though!

  1. Thanks James… I’m off to look at mine now. mighty kind of ya really!

    dave cormier 26 October 2005 at 2pm

  2. Does the fake googlebot apear to be comming from a different IP range? If so could you bad that IP range? If it is a fake googlebot I would guess that it wouldn’t follow the robots.txt file.

    Matthew Buckett 26 October 2005 at 8pm