For the past two days I have seen hundreds of visits from the LinkWalker bot. The initial visit was to Robots.txt, with the following Referer and User-Agent: "www.seventwentyfour.com/" "LinkWalker". All other hits came from either no referer or links to spamvertized, MFA websites full of BS links. All had the UA LinkWalker. When I visited some of these websites in the Referer field I discovered that none had my website listed in the source code. All links on these websites went to CGI scripts, all all had similar graphics and layouts.

I decided to learn more about this bot and what benefit I might gain from allowing it to return to eat up my bandwidth, so off I went to find out more about seventwentyfour.com and it's LinkWalker bot.

I eventually ended up here: [mrweb.com...] - reading the following public News Release.

Brandimensions Buys Technology Firm

May 30 2006

Brandimensions, Inc. has acquired online link mapping specialist SEVENtwentyfour Inc., and will incorporate its LinkWalker technology and 52 billion-link map of the Internet into its existing market intelligence and brand protection offerings. Both companies are based in Toronto, Canada.

The buy will enable Brandimensions to enhance its market intelligence offering to brand holders in research, marketing, advertising, public relations and CRM by mapping out 'brand communities,' where consumers, advocates and influencers discuss brands. In addition, LinkWalker will give it ‘the brand protection industry's most efficient and robust monitoring capability for detecting trademark infringements, fraudulent activity and identity theft’. LinkWalker scans the Web and quickly identifies unauthorized third-party references to and usage of an organization's brands and identity.
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I then visited www.brandimensions.com and found this on their page about "Market Intelligence:"

The Internet is an enormous and rapidly growing wellspring of dynamic information. The Brandimensions market intelligence service captures and analyzes buzz commentary generated on a daily basis by customers, potential customers, competitors, journalists and industry professionals. The research and information captured in Brandimensions market intelligence reports enable global companies to drive critical business decisions about brands, marketing, product development and public relations, in a timely, results oriented, tactical manner. Within hours of a new product or message release, Brandimensions analytical indexes deliver business value through a series of leading indicators, including consumer purchasing intent, customer satisfaction, brand and message perception, product performance and competitive positioning.

I added the bold for emphasis. I am not stealing anything from anybody, nor do I wish to have my bandwidth used up for some marketer's analytics. Since this bot and it's new owner serves me no useful purpose I told it not to index any pages, via Robots.txt and banned it both by name and by it's CIDR: 209.167.50.16/28, in .htaccess.

Wiz