googlebot posting in my news comments !

farm

often when people post a comment related to a news post, right after they post there will be one right after theirs thats just blank.

Dns resolved 66.249.65.33 to crawl-66-249-65-33.googlebot.com

its always that same ip.

heres the website

news.php code

comments.php code

i appreciate any help given.. suppose to launch this new layout tomorrow.

wilku

You can try to "scare off" google bot by adding

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

to your header on a page, where there is a possibility to add a comment (maybe just NOFOLLOW, if you want a content to be indexed).
Alternatively you can use robots.txt to set up where bots can or can't go on your page.

bradgrafelman

Google itself has a robots.txt that blocks certain places on its website.

Alternatively, if it's just Googlebot that is crawling your comments page, you could most likely block Googlebot from posting by identifying and checking for it's User Agent (I believe it has a unique, identifying user agent) in your PHP script.

The robots.txt would, of course, be the preferred method however.

farm

so i would do something like this ? ..

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: comments.php

and put that in djfarm.com/robots.txt ?

if i did that.. would that decrease search engine ranking ? thanks for the help guys

wilku

Yes, that's what you should do. As for the second question - I don't know. Probably it won't influence the ranking much, if any. Someone more familiar with bots should answer this.

bradgrafelman

Well I think it would only affect ranking such that if you got a hit at slot #1 linking to "comments.php" and your next hit was at slot #3 linking to some other file, your top-most ranking now will be #3, since the comments.php will probably get bumped...

or is this more complicated than that? I'm not sure.

vaaaska

Google has been experimenting with some caching things that are doing funny things to some sites. You do a search on Google and caching and/or contact them about it.