Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

- Tilted Technology (https://thetfp.com/tfp/tilted-technology/)

- - googlebot acting wierd (https://thetfp.com/tfp/tilted-technology/82867-googlebot-acting-wierd.html)

googlebot acting wierd

hi all,

I run a server for several websites of reasonably low volume (and pretty constant) volume. Last night my monitors showed sudden increase in traffic volume, and more surprisingly the average database usage went up ten-fold from the average usage the weeks before. (though like I said, I'm running very low-traffic sites).

Naturally I checked the logs, and it turns out that googlebot is making these hits:

Code:

 07/Feb/2005:08:42:46 +0100 "GET /forum/index.php?sid=some-number HTTP/1.1" 200 19979 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

07/Feb/2005:08:42:52 +0100 "GET /forum/index.php?sid=some-other-number HTTP/1.1" 200 19979 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

And this about 300 hits an hour for about 6 hours (still going on).
Of course this would be fine, if it weren't for the weird URLS.
I obfuscated them for privacy protection (it is not my site), but I checked manually and there is no "clickable" way to get thousands of different "sid" in the URL. It is a forum, but none of the Googlebot hits actually seem to view a forum or a posting. They all just hit with a new sid (session Id, I presume) and therefore all return the same page size (forum main page).

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I think google is supposed to be indexing the forumpostings, but it never seems to get there.
(while just clicking around on the site, it is easy to get to a posting, and I can't even get a URL with a different "sid" just by clicking...)
I wonder where google gets it's "sid" from.
or is this a googlebot look-a-like that is trying to capture sessions or something?

Follow-up: I e-mailed google on the subject. I'll post whatever comes of that.

First having sid's in published search engine listings can be a huge security/privacy problem.

Secondly because of the way googlebot in particular works, having sid's in your url's can cause what is commonly know as the 'google dance' where googlebot gets trapped in your site causing a huge amount of page hits.

Ok. So how does one go about not using sid's?
I'm not running the forum myself so I don't know the particulars, but I think the sid's are used when cookies won't work?
When I browse manually, no sid's are placed on the url ever.

And how does the google dance work? It doesn't guess the sids does it? so they must be a result of something, but I can't reproduce it. Any tips?

what is the forum run on? what platform, name of forum backend (phpBB, vBulletin, etc.)

Judging by the forum-footer it is running on phpBB 2.0.10 with MySQL

The server is GNU/Linux and Apache 2.

Try this:
Also make sure that the file you edit is backed up first!!

Links:
http://www.phpbbfetchall.com/phpBB2/about1816.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum103/297.htm

Quote:

# ---[ OPEN ]

/includes/sessions.php

# ---[ FIND ]

function append_sid($url, $non_html_amp = false)
{
global $SID;

if (!empty($SID) && !preg_match('#sid=#', $url) )
{
$url .= ( ( strpos($url, '?') != false ) ? ( ( $non_html_amp ) ? '&' : '&' ) : '?' ) . $SID;
}

return $url;
}

# ---[ CHANGE TO ]

function append_sid($url, $non_html_amp = false)
{
global $SID, $HTTP_SERVER_VARS;

$_this_agent = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

if (preg_match("/google/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/slurp/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/archive/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/crawl/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/validator/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/robot/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (preg_match("/check/i", $_this_agent)) {
return $url;
}

if (!empty($SID) && !preg_match('#sid=#', $url) )
{
$url .= ( ( strpos($url, '?') != false ) ? ( ( $non_html_amp ) ? '&' : '&' ) : '?' ) . $SID;
}

return $url;
}

# ---[ SAVE & CLOSE ]

Thanks for all this info!
It seems a sensible enough patch.

I also saw similar patches ("guest session mod" and more) on the links you provided.
I emailed the owner of the site to point out the problem and possible solution. Now it's out of my hands :)
Thanks again!