Detecting well behaved / well known bots
Posted
by Simon_Weaver
on Stack Overflow
See other posts from Stack Overflow
or by Simon_Weaver
Published on 2009-06-06T23:45:21Z
Indexed on
2010/05/25
8:41 UTC
Read the original article
Hit count: 194
I found this question very interesting : Programmatic Bot Detection I have a very similar question, but I'm not bothered about 'badly behaved bots'.
I am tracking (in addition to google analytics) the following per visit :
- Entry URL
- Referer
- UserAgent
- Adwords (by means of query string)
- Whether or not the user made a purchase
- etc.
The problem is that to calculate any kind of conversion rate I'm ending up with lots of 'bot' visits that are greatly skewing my results.
I'd like to ignore as many as possible bot visits, but I want a solution that I don't need to monitor too closely, and that won't in itself be a performance hog and preferably still work if someone has javascript disabled.
Are there good published lists of the top 100 bots or so? I did find a list at http://www.user-agents.org/ but that appears to contain hundreds if not thousands of bots. I don't want to check every referer against thousands of links.
Here is the current googlebot UserAgent. How often does it change?
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
© Stack Overflow or respective owner