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Google tries to crawl pages that might exist

2 points by parham ↗ HN
The Google bot has recently started randomly crawling pages, specially for profile and news pages e.g. /profile/<random_name> or /news/<random_id>

Neither the profile or news path prefix are used in my site's urls.

Some examples random names were “BobHope” and “suitcase_murphy” these aren't included or related to the site in question at all.

I'm not complaining this is just an observation, has this happened to anyone else?

10 comments

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benologist
The chance of either of those URLs being present on a site would have to be miniscule. Most likely they followed some outdated link somewhere.
parham
Very unlikely as it's a development server (I should've mentioned) I doubt anyone linked back.
benologist
Here's two simple ways links could have happened:

- someone having the domain before you

- script kiddies machine-generating links to pages on random domains so Google finds exploitable targets for them

Google is not randomly looking for pages - that's brute-forcing a site map and it's utterly, impossibly inefficient even to supplement what they find crawling around.

throwaway420
Possibly they're checking random URLs to see if a site is erroneously redirecting what should be 404s to random content pages?
andrewcooke
if you were going to write that code, would you use a url like that or a long, random string that you know will not exist? and why wouldn't you add at the end "this will not exist don't worry"?
ancarda
I downloaded all my logs from a public-facing development server. Hitting anything returns "403 Forbidden" except for a few domains which should not be crawled (google does it anyway). Most traffic is usual (hit / and /robots.txt then leave). All I found (in 41 rotated logs) was:

    access.log.12:66.249.73.132 - - [29/Oct/2013:01:26:15 +0100] "GET /?ac=2 HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
    access.log.12:66.249.73.132 - - [29/Oct/2013:03:24:12 +0100] "GET /?tag=lazy HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
    access.log.3:66.249.66.57 - - [06/Nov/2013:12:12:42 +0100] "GET /?ac=2&slt=8&slr=1&lpt=1 HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
    access.log.4:66.249.75.57 - - [05/Nov/2013:19:14:19 +0100] "GET /?cat=1 HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
    access.log.5:66.249.66.109 - - [04/Nov/2013:15:54:01 +0100] "GET /?ac=2&slt=8&slr=1&lpt=1 HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
    access.log.5:66.249.75.18 - - [05/Nov/2013:03:08:27 +0100] "GET /?ac=2&slt=8&slr=1&lpt=1 HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
I have no idea what "?ac", "?cat" or "?tag" are suppose to do. Nothing on the server responds to GET params (I use url rewrites and POST only) so I don't think I ever made a link (not even accidentally).

I found nothing for "/profile" or "/news"

parham
My server is also a public-facing development server. I think they might be trying to find pages that aren't linked to directly in a hope to find more unlined pages... just a theory
andrewcooke
i've found an example of a similar url - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19674788/redirect-url-hav... - so i am wondering if you have an ip that previously belonged to someone using whatever software that is (some kind of index or pagination i assume) and which had links with a numeric ip address....
parham
Oh wow didn't think of that, that is the reason, the IP address I'm using is an Elastic IP from AWS that I'm reusing from an old project, that project had those exact same links.
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