Apple

On 2012-10-31, at 6:55 PM, Paul Hoadley wrote:

Hello,

I noticed some strange requests in the log of a live application the other day:

66.249.74.173 - - [25/Oct/2012:10:19:42 +0000] "GET /SurvStar/1/ja/bTJaOg4yM8yusyH07q7Fsw/0.0.43.1 HTTP/1.1" 200 1997
66.249.74.173 - - [25/Oct/2012:10:21:48 +0000] "GET /SurvStar/1/ja/bPCp9YKaWJtYnBAbefb3rg/0.0.43.1 HTTP/1.1" 200 1997
66.249.74.173 - - [25/Oct/2012:10:24:53 +0000] "GET /SurvStar/1/ja/bPYhQJ0ZxsN6ps2AsILtBg/0.0.43.1 HTTP/1.1" 200 1996
66.249.74.173 - - [25/Oct/2012:10:27:42 +0000] "GET /SurvStar/1/ja/0zwYRxtDseruVePtbAddHw/0.0.43.1 HTTP/1.1" 200 1999

(And dozens more.) That IP address belongs to Google:

$ nslookup 66.249.74.173
Server: 192.231.203.132
Address: 192.231.203.132#53

Non-authoritative answer:
173.74.249.66.in-addr.arpa name = crawl-66-249-74-173.googlebot.com.

The 200 response it's getting is the session restoration error page, as those session IDs are bogus. Has anyone seen anything like this? Remind me—what's the "ja" request handler? Any thoughts on where it would be pulling these (presumably never existent) session IDs from?

Not sure about the /ja/, I think it is an older Ajax request handler. I don't recall ever seeing it in my applications. the /0. as the context ID means that this is an initial component request. If you look at the SurvStar homepage, you will see

//<![CDATA[

(function(){

var xhr = window.XMLHttpRequest?new XMLHttpRequest():new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"),

url = '',

key = '_timezone',

Google must be picking up on this or some other link and try to follow it. I have seen this before where it will record the URL of an error or other page. Just block robots from indexing through /ja/.

Chuck

--
Chuck Hill Senior Consultant / VP Development

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References:
	>Strange Googlebot activity (From: Paul Hoadley <email@hidden>)