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Lots of "Amazon" visitors

One of my new sites today had a ton of visitors whose IP came up "Amazon." Has anyone else seen this? Does it mean Amazon bots, because they probed most pages of the site the way bots do. I've just never noticed "Amazon" visiting any of my sites before, so I'm curious.

Posted Wed Nov 30 2011 8:29a by merono***


In my experience this happens when you share your page on social networks (or someone else does). Bots will go to your site to get some info about the shared page.

Posted Wed Nov 30 2011 9:09a by rikbr***


Someone running a bot from EC2?

Posted Wed Nov 30 2011 9:37a by stewartmc***


We do specifically block visits from being logged that are from "Amazon Web Services", which is where I would expect any bots to be coming from. However we can't reliably block "Amazon" because they have thousands of employees that I'm sure spend lots of time browsing the web. But yes this looks like a bot. If the IP is the same for every visit then you can just enter in that IP in your block list.

Posted Wed Nov 30 2011 10:20a by Your Friendly Clicky Admin


I'll block it if I'm sure it's a bot, but I'm more curious to figure out for sure what it is.

What I'm seeing is a couple dozen 10 second, 1 action visits from this "amazon", preceeded by a 1 hour 56 minute 139 action marathon visit from them. The first (marathon) visit was at 2:20 am PDT, and the rest started one minute later and continued until 4:11 am. The marathon visit was from Pleasanton CA with a hostname "amazonaws.com" using Linux and Google Chrome. Most of the other visits were from Seattle WA (Amazon HQ), but the rest were from NYC, Nashville, NJ, etc. - all over the US. All using Linux, Chrome and the same resolution.

It's got to be some kind of bot, given the time of night in those places. Also, I don't think amazon has a presence in Nashville (they were negotiating putting something near there, but debating sales tax issues a few months ago), so it has to be a server location rather than an office.

There are quite a few IPs involved. I'll definitely block them if it's a problem, but for now it's actually helpful to know they're spidering the site on that level. I've just never known them to do that on other sites (but then, I didn't have Clicky's awesome visitor tracking powers until a few months ago, LOL).

Posted Wed Nov 30 2011 10:47a by merono***


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