msnbot
Microsoft's search engine bot for web indexing
About this crawler
msnbot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern msnbot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block msnbot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
0.85%
Technical details
- Name
- msnbot
- Pattern
msnbot- Tags
- search-engine
- Reference
- https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0
- rDNS suffixes
.search.msn.com- Instances
- 12 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely msnbot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.search.msn.com
Sample User-Agent strings
adidxbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
adidxbot/2.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-NewsBlogs/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-media/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm).
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)._
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow msnbot:
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "msnbot") {
return 403;
}
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