Weblog entry #99 for simonw
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#99
Price of a Captcha / Googlebots making soap gifts?
Posted by simonw on Mon 16 Oct 2006 at 14:23
Judging by the abuse of a phpBB2 board on one of our clients sites, it is now worth at least one spammers time to complete a captcha, to get one backlink buried deep in an inactive users profile [sigh]. Obviously the captcha could be being completed automatically, or by a third party, hard to know our end.
I hacked 'rel="nofollow"' into the template the profile uses to discourage them.
Hmm, for the record it seems that the abusers UserAgent string was faked to be;
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)";
(From several IP addresses)
I figure real Googlebots shouldn't be trying to sign up to phpBB2 bulletin boards using POST, unless the Googlebots have started taking up making soap gifts for people as a hobby.
A real Googlebot followed right along the next day and indexed all this, so it worked for them this week, where as Google won't index my new content, or our much cleaned up website where we publish clients pages if they don't buy a domain name, ARGH......
I hacked 'rel="nofollow"' into the template the profile uses to discourage them.
Hmm, for the record it seems that the abusers UserAgent string was faked to be;
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)";
(From several IP addresses)
I figure real Googlebots shouldn't be trying to sign up to phpBB2 bulletin boards using POST, unless the Googlebots have started taking up making soap gifts for people as a hobby.
A real Googlebot followed right along the next day and indexed all this, so it worked for them this week, where as Google won't index my new content, or our much cleaned up website where we publish clients pages if they don't buy a domain name, ARGH......