creepy crawlies

[Dana Gold]

I just happened to take a look-see under 'currently active users' and the majority were "google spiders". It seems unfortunate that the Internet has become infested with such "bugs" and other "crawling critters" with probable dubious motives. Is there no way to set up some sort of "fly-paper" or "insecticide" program to keep these apparent pests :sick: from "landing" here?

Dana :thinking2

[Sarra]

There is. It's called a robots file. Tells spiders and bots to go elsewhere. However, then, this forum wouldn't show up on major search engines, and possible users woudlnt' be able to find the forum easily. That's how I got here...

[Betsy]

Google does a deep crawl every couple of weeks. Yahoo and MSN a bit more often then google. It seems that both have been doing some very deep crawling the past couple of days and there are theories abound on the internet as to why that is.

It is known that google periodically restructures their search logorithms. It is likely you are seeing a googlebot or several as a result more frequently.

I'm not willing to not invite them in. Sarra is correct in using robots.txt to make them go away but it would make us invisible on the internet.

Betsy

[MelissP]

Google does a deep crawl every couple of weeks. Yahoo and MSN a bit more often then google. It seems that both have been doing some very deep crawling the past couple of days and there are theories abound on the internet as to why that is.

It is known that google periodically restructures their search logorithms. It is likely you are seeing a googlebot or several as a result more frequently.

I'm not willing to not invite them in. Sarra is correct in using robots.txt to make them go away but it would make us invisible on the internet.

Betsy

Hi Betsy,
I think google may be doing some of the deep crawling because of
gmail users, (like me ... umm sorry) Shortly after I signed up here, I
replied to a private message from another member using gmail; a
couple of days later, google started wanting me to invite 44 people
from BOL to sign up for their service. It's kind of like they're doing
address harvesting :-(

Mel

[Betsy]

Emails being included in profiles are not in the clear and are protected from spiders. They are also protected from other members until you write to someone using yourself and then you actually reveal it.

I also use gmail and have noticed that corresponding with other gmail addressees does result in a larger number of invites than usual. It has nothing to do with BLO.

Betsy