Basically it reads websites, harvests their email addresses and sends an email usually with a womans name that says, 'I have visited your website at ..... and noticed it isn't in some search engines.' Then it goes on to sell their garbage ware promotion services.

Since I run a number of sites and SEO for a number of others, these guys have gotten pretty annoying to say the least.

I've tried to contact them directly for several months, but they won't reply to emails. Does anyone know how to block their spider using a robots.txt file????

This kind of spam advertising needs to be stopped, any ideas are very welcomed.

It works for a company called bigfishsubmit just add the www. and .com to visit their site

Apparently they are based in Australia or at least there is where their server is.
I have contacted the company hundreds times, I have contacted they server provider, I have contacted their site webdesigner (which is the only one with decency) and nothing gets sorted

Cathy Wilson
I have visited your site, I like it... AAAGGHHH - I hate it man
and them she claim that whatever site do not rank in top 30 in whatever search engines (even when in many occasions the site it DOES SO) but them of course you have to deal with your customers and explain over and over that this is rubbish and whatnot

Definitely it should be possible to take steps again this kind of things, nothing major, just burn her computer out of something like it but I guest that instead all we are able to do is keep pressing the delete button for much that we maybe complaint

Do not get desperate and do not upset yourself or else she will have won twice

code:

---

# Tells robots that they aren't welcome
# User-agent:	can also specify by name (ie. spambot; "*" is for everyone
# Disallow:	if this matches first part of requested path, forget it
User-agent: thespambot #Identify by name
Disallow: /   # disallow indexing of all pages

---

You can also disallow certain directories or pages:
User-agent: thespambot
Disallow: /tmp #ignore everything in the temp directory
Disallow: /pages/nospam.html #ignore the nospam.html
Check out more info here: http://www.wdvl.com/Location/Search/Robots.html

I'd also check out the "Truth about Email Marketing" at the Get High Traffic Forums

There is a lengthy thread there about blocking harvestors.

[Note: This message has been edited by Sinoed]

What an embarrasment to the industy they are!

I love it when I get the bot coming in to a client with a screen shot of MY website (as webmaster) and not the clients.. it is so laughable!

I am planing to change the Email contact at my web site to form based. The only place the address will sit will be the CGI script.
Same way as it's being done in the new forums.

Yes there are a few more there but this one is the winner

It really left you under floor level in front of your customers, even if they are right as if they are not, and this is in my case where I make sure my customers understand right from the beginning that even when I will do my best for putting them reasonable well in the search engines they are NOT paying for this and I am not offering this as a service therefore they have nothing to complaint for - SO I can imagine at what level this people will left real seo companies

When I get tired having to explain this to my customers I just say:
If they claim you are not found, how in the world have they found you? and that kind of left them a bit more relaxed

Everytime I get a new client, help them to re-structure their content and then start to index the site, scambot lady comes with her professional looking, but cheezy email. Then comes my client that says, hey, 'these guys will concentrate on more engines, and charge a fraction of what you do?'

Then comes the usual dance of how I use promotion techniques that are more sound and practical, 80% of all traffic, select few engines, yada yada....we all know the drill.

I gotta wonder if this harvestor is actually collecting by crawling the net, or if it could be that we are putting our information into some minor engine somewhere, who's sole purpose is to send out the scambot to harvest website addresses?

I like Valencia's comment, 'If they claim you are not found, how in the world have they found you?'

Scuba's idea to generate emails from CGI is probably best, but it would be a shame to have to go through all the websites I have and all the webpages just to server side include emails.

I am going to try this javascript on a the next site I am working on:

<script language="javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="mailto:thename' + '@' + 'theurl.com">thename' + '@' + 'theurl.com</a>');
// -->
</script>

I can only hope that they haven't written their harvesting software to collect from javascript. If they have, then they truly are scumlords.

Thanx all,

SpyderWeb

they don't overly care if the email is correct or valid

what's even worse is fools like above that just take the domain name and appened their own user such as 'webmaster@' 'info@' 'sales@' - all the common ones. these are just as effective since many sites use catchalls and just adjust the user to suit the need.