Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Some more observations about the MJ12Bot
I received another reply from MJ12Bot about their badly written bot and it just said the person responsible for handling enquiries was out of the office for the day and I should expect a reponse tomorrow. We shall see. In the mean time, I decided to check some of the other bots hitting my site and see how well they fare, request wise. And I'm using the logs from last month for this, so these results are for 30 days of traffic.
| requests | percentage | user agent |
|---|---|---|
| 167235 | 70 | Total (out of 239641) |
| 46334 | 19 | The Knowledge AI |
| 38097 | 16 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/3~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html) |
| 17130 | 7 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BLEXBot/1.0; +http://webmeup-crawler.com/) |
| 15928 | 7 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/6.1; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/) |
| 12358 | 5 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) |
| 8929 | 4 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MegaIndex.ru/2.0; +http://megaindex.com/crawler) |
| 8908 | 4 | Gigabot |
| 7872 | 3 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8; http://mj12bot.com/) |
| 6942 | 3 | Barkrowler/0.9 (+http://www.exensa.com/crawl) |
| 4737 | 2 | istellabot/t.1.13 |
So let's see some results:
| Bot | 200 | % | 301 | % | 304 | % | 400 | % | 403 | % | 404 | % | 410 | % | 500 | % | Total | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Knowledge AI | 42676 | 92.1 | 3352 | 7.2 | 0 | 0.0 | 127 | 0.3 | 4 | 0.0 | 170 | 0.4 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 46334 | 100.0 |
| SemrushBot/3~bl | 36088 | 94.7 | 1873 | 4.9 | 0 | 0.0 | 110 | 0.3 | 0 | 0.0 | 21 | 0.1 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 38097 | 100.0 |
| BLEXBot/1.0 | 16633 | 97.1 | 208 | 1.2 | 124 | 0.7 | 114 | 0.7 | 0 | 0.0 | 46 | 0.3 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 17130 | 100.0 |
| AhrefsBot/6.1 | 15840 | 99.4 | 78 | 0.5 | 0 | 0.0 | 4 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 1 | 0.0 | 15928 | 99.9 |
| bingbot/2.0 | 12304 | 99.6 | 35 | 0.3 | 0 | 0.0 | 6 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 3 | 0.0 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 12353 | 99.9 |
| MegaIndex.ru/2.0 | 8412 | 94.2 | 456 | 5.1 | 0 | 0.0 | 24 | 0.3 | 0 | 0.0 | 36 | 0.4 | 1 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 8929 | 100.0 |
| Gigabot | 8428 | 94.6 | 448 | 5.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 23 | 0.3 | 0 | 0.0 | 7 | 0.1 | 2 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 8908 | 100.0 |
| MJ12bot/v1.4.8 | 2015 | 25.6 | 175 | 2.2 | 0 | 0.0 | 2 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 5680 | 72.2 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 7872 | 100.0 |
| Barkrowler/0.9 | 6604 | 95.1 | 300 | 4.3 | 0 | 0.0 | 10 | 0.1 | 0 | 0.0 | 28 | 0.4 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 6942 | 99.9 |
| istellabot/t.1.13 | 4705 | 99.3 | 28 | 0.6 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0.0 | 4 | 0.1 | 4737 | 100.0 |
Percentage wise of the top 10 bots hitting my blog (and in fact, these are the 10 ten clients hitting my blog) MJ12Bot is just bad at 72% bad requests. It's hard to say what the second worst one is, but I'll have to give it to “The Knowledge AI” bot (and my search-foo is failing me in finding anything about this one). Percentage wise, it's about on-par with the others, but some of its requests are also rather odd:
/%22/%22https:/www.brevardnc.org/business-directory/5474/rockys-soda-shop/%22/%22http:/brevardnc.org/%22/%22https:/www.greenvillesc.gov/%22/%22https:/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesars_Head_State_Park/%22/%22https:/www.transylvaniacounty.org/town-of-rosman/%22
It appears to be a similar problem as MJ12Bot, but one that doesn't happen nearly as often.
Now, this isn't to say I don't have some legitimate “not found“ (404) results. I did come across some actual valid 404 results on my own blog:
/2004/08/18/mias@speedy.com.pe/2012/08/10/HREF/2013/01/02/menamena/2013/02/01/HREF/2014/05/04/HREF/2015/02/10/B000FBJCJE/2015/07/10/mailtp:admin@macropayday.com
Some are typos, some are placeholders for links I forgot to add. And those I can fix. I just wish someone would fix MJ12Bot. Not because it's bogging down my site with unwanted traffic, but because it's just bad at what it does.
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")