Herself’s Webtools

A friend runs a local forum and she mentioned several GoogleBots were hanging around all day and night on her forum. I thought this a bit odd so I did some digging. Several forums about running forums turned up lots of GoogleBots hanging out at forums day and night. Many of these forums were still new and low traffic.

Further investigation turned up Instructions on how to surf as the GoogleBot to gain access to restricted areas of forums. Not so nice. This will often let you into restricted areas and avoid detection while on a forum. Forum webmasters need to make sure that the GoogleBot is not given extra privileges to their sites with out first verifying it is in fact Google.

A user need only install User Agent Switcher to Firefox to hide behind Google so this means anyone who can install a plugin can pull this off. Slightly more sophisticated users can do this with IE Become a GoogleBot get a free pass. Further instructions are at GoogleBot Extension.

All these howtos I’ve posted are not to tell your forum members how to hide behind GoogleBot, they already know. These are to show you, the forum master what those pretend GoogleBots are able to do so that you can properly lock down your forum. So fire up your browser, set it up to hide as Google and see what you can get into on your forum. Make sure it is only areas the general public should be able to access.