What's this appearing in my stats? 

If you have reached this page you may have found "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Seo Specialist Bot; +http://www.seo-specialist.org/bot.html)" appearing in your web stats.

The Seo Specialist Bot is a web robot we have designed to ping websites to check their online status, as well as check a variety of SEO points about them such as Google page rank, search positions etc.

If your site has recorded us visiting you, it means yourself or someone else has added your site to our records for us to check the site is live and to email or txt message them if it goes down. 

If you have not added the site, you can block the spider either from your stats program or your entire site.

Rest assured, our bot is however completely harmless though and is simply used to check some SEO stats for your site.

You can block the bot from your stats generally by adding an exception into either the code, or perhaps your stats program allows you to add bots to block. 

For example, in php you could set the following to ignore our bot:

     <?php if(!stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Seo Specialist Bot') { # Run stats here... } ?>   

If you do wish to block the bot from your entire site, you can do so with .htaccess, or robots.txt or in server side code (e.g. PHP, ASP, Ruby etc...).

To block via robots.txt, please add the following to your robots.txt file

     User-agent: Seo Specialist Bot Disallow: / # If needed you can change this to specify a directory for us never to access, e.g. Disallow: /private/   

To block via .htaccess, please add the following to your .htaccess file

    RewriteEngine on    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Seo Specialist Bot    RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]   

You can also block via any server side language similar to the PHP example above, you could change it so the script sets an error header or just exits when the HTTP_USER_AGENT contains 'Seo Specialist Bot'. E.g.

     <?php if(stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Seo Specialist Bot') { header('HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden'); exit(); } ?>   

If you're not using a server side language, and just programming in html/xhtml and still want to block us, you can only do so with either the robots.txt or .htaccess techniques. More information on using these techniques is available via Google or other search engines.

Sorry, we do not get involved in making these changes for you, please refer to your webmaster for assistance.