Googlebot detection library

An example of determining the belonging of GoogleBot to the Google search engine

Very often, attackers crawl websites to, for example, pass content, posing as a Google search engine bot. Attackers perform this simple trick by passing a User-Agent header containing the same information as in the headers of a real bot: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Such actions of cybercriminals can not only create unnecessary load on your Internet servers, but also crawl the content of your sites without your consent.

In order to prevent unwanted activity of fake bots impersonating GoogleBot, you can use the following PHP code example (Googlebot detection library):

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'Googlebot') !== false) {
	$iphost = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	if (substr($iphost, -10) != "google.com" && substr($iphost, -13) != "googlebot.com")
		echo "It's a fake GoogleBot! :(";
	else
		echo "It's a real GoogleBot! :)";
}

This way, you can prevent unwanted activity from bots that are not related to the Google search engine.

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