Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Redirection 301/307

Author: J.Yard2 (7 May 07 9:37pm)

Do the bots respond to 301 and/or 307 redirections?

If not that could be a cool way to keep them away from forms and email addresses.

Re: Redirection 301/307

Author: M.Prince (7 May 07 11:51pm)

In our experience, bots typically follow 301/302 redirects. They typically do not follow javascript redirects.

Re: Redirection 301/307

Author: B.Webmaster (4 Dec 07 11:57pm)

On an extension of the first question:

Before we heard about Project Honey Pot we had constructed a shield to deflect the most obvious bad bots with a 403.

The shield was and still is surprisingly effective. Some bot manufacturers simply does not run quality assurance on their bots before deploying them. Which is good for us when it makes them easier to detect ;-)

On the other hand having this shield also means that the bots will never see an install of the Honey Pot or the QuickLink and thus will not get caught by Project Honey Pot.

Would a redirect to either an installed Honey Pot or a QuickLink be ok and wanted?

A 302 may be more appropriate in some cases since we have found that quite a few good guys forget to set the User-Agent of their bots.

An example is the Technorati ClaimBot which makes two visits upon a claim. Once with User-Agent set to "" and once with it set to"1".