What do the bots on the messageboard do?

Post by **J T** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 3:05 am

There are often more bots on the messageboard than people, like right now the board index lists...

Registered users: Baidu [Spider], Bing [Bot], Exabot [Bot], Google [Bot], J T, MSNbot Media, Yahoo [Bot]

That means the bots will probably read this post before the humans. I started thinking about this because I was wondering: When they read a thread, does the bot increase the thread's view count, or does that feature only count human reads?

But then I got curious about what do they actually do? Are they just web crawlers helping to index things for different search engines? Do they have other functions?

Post by **samsonlonghair** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 5:24 am

Well, I can tell you that Gogglebot is certainly a spider. It's crawling racketboy to index our forum for Google search results. This is actually a good thing, because it increases our relevancy in Google search results. Hence if you google a specific query about a specific retro console, racketboy is often in the first page of google results.

Post by **fastbilly1** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 12:11 pm

Samson is spot on. They just index it for search results.

Post by **MrPopo** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 1:11 pm

They also track your movements JT. Not anyone else's, just yours.

Post by **8bit** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 1:20 pm

Good thing too because just today I googled "genesis case shipping weight" and the first link was to hobie-wans shipping thread. Those bots are doing a good job!

Post by **J T** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 2:24 pm

Does a bot viewing a thread increase the number of thread views? That is what I am most interested in knowing.

Post by **fastbilly1** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 3:17 pm

That is a really good question. I do not know.

Funny enough, if you google that question, this topic is the third hit.

Post by **J T** » Mon Jun 27, 2016 3:51 pm

Google might have given you tailored search results that prioritize this site. I just looked on duckduckgo.com and didn't see racketboy listed. I did find something that said webpage views can filter out known crawlers and bots, but that they do create page views if not filtered. I also found a lot of questionable services advertising that they can boost your page views and youtube views with bots.

Post by **Gunstar Green** » Tue Jun 28, 2016 12:25 am

Skynet.

Post by **ejamer** » Tue Jun 28, 2016 9:36 am

J T wrote:Does a bot viewing a thread increase the number of thread views? That is what I am most interested in knowing.

I believe that depends on the software being used and/or the server setup. Only someone who set up this site could confirm if it's being counted as a hit.

Relevant link that might be interesting:
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/que ... iew-counts

What do the bots on the messageboard do?

What do the bots on the messageboard do?

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