Bot viewing a user profile
 

I was looking at who was online and found a Guest was viewing a user account. When I clicked on the IP address of the Guest, I got

crawl-66-249-73-221.googlebot.com

When I looked again, it was viewing another user profile

How can a Guest be viewing a User Profile? How do I prevent this?

Should I be concerned?

How do I kill a Guest?

Jim

Guests can view User Profiles unless you have Usergroup Manager > Unregistered users > Can View Member Info set to No. If it is set to Yes, then guests can see user profiles.

Thanks, I just found the answer in another post too. I turned off that ability.

As you explained, I turned off "View Member Info"

What would a bot be doing with that info?

Jim

The googlebot will grab information so when someone searches on google for terms on the profile page, then that will show up in the results.

The same as with every other info. It makes them accessible by search engine. Search engine spiders can't tell and don't care what they index - if they find it and are not told otherwise, they index it.

Keep in mind even if those profiles are blocked from public view, googlebot and other crawlers will still go to those URLs. It's not a big deal either way.

I keep profiles public, no point really in blocking them.

Obviously I'm new at this. So, would that mean that my users/members would turn up in Google searches?

And if so, what shows up? userids? email addresses? everything in the profile?

Search engine spiders index words and images. These become searchable in their databases.

Yes.

Whatever you can see in the profile when not logged in. Userids? Of course. They are present in the URL. But who cares for a random number? E-Mail? No. E-Mail addresses are nowhere shown in vB.

Googlebots, and other bots, and just Unregistered users. They may only see what an unregistered user may see on any page that they go to.