MSN Bot

This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan

<p>There is an article over on the <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2103">Search Engine Journal</a> about MSN bot hammering peoples bandwidth. I noticed this too on my <a href="http://www.kinlan.co.uk/Atom.xml">Atom.xml</a> file, it is one of the reasons that my most prominent RSS syndication link is on <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Kinlan">Feedburner</a>.<p />MSN Bot, was hitting my Atom XML file once every minute or so from what I could tell, and it had used about 100 MB of my transfere limit. Not much really, but this was only 15 days into the month. My traffic this month has gone through the roof in comparison to previous months. I thouhgt I had more readers, turns out it might have been MSN bot.<p />Supposedly MSN Bot is a syndication search engine, (the article only mentions RSS, but it was getting my ATOM feed). It is searching for new data all the time, thus it hits your feed to see if it has changed. There is information <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/08/22/454544.aspx">here</a>, and also at MSN about how to slow it down. Basically it involves creating a Robots.txt file in the your directory, which tells the MSN bot to come back in <em>x</em> minutes time.<p />I created a Robots.txt file, and it reduced the problem substantially.<p /></p>

This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan