scoop.it bot

The scoop.it bot is a web crawler for the content curation platform Scoop.it. The platform combines automated content discovery with human curation to create topic-based collections. The service employs several specialized crawlers to collect content from websites and RSS feeds. These crawlers identify themselves with user-agent strings such as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; scoopit-crawler/3; +https://www.scoop.it/bot.html). The bots are designed to be transparent and respect standard web protocols.

The scoop.it bot is crawling your website to discover and index content that may be relevant to the topics being curated by its users. Your site may be visited if a user manually adds your content to their collection, if your RSS feed is being monitored, or if your content has been algorithmically identified as relevant to an existing topic. The frequency of visits depends on user interest and your content update schedule. This crawling is generally considered authorized as long as it respects robots.txt.

The purpose of the scoop.it bot is to support the Scoop.it content discovery and curation platform. For website owners, Scoop.it can provide additional visibility and traffic by exposing your content to new audiences interested in your topics. When a user 'scoops' your content, they create backlinks and social sharing opportunities that can drive referral traffic. The platform preserves attribution by maintaining links to the original source. However, as with any aggregation service, there are considerations about how much content is displayed on the platform versus what drives traffic to your site.

To prevent the scoop.it bot from accessing your website, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. There are several user-agents for the service, so you may need to block them individually.

To block the main crawler, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: scoopit-crawler
Disallow: /

To verify user-agent authenticity, you can use host linux command two times with the IP address of the requester.

If the output matches the original IP address and the domain is associated with a trusted operator (e.g., Scoop.it), the user-agent can be considered legitimate.

Some operators provide a public list of IP addresses used by their crawlers. This list can be cross-referenced to verify a user-agent's authenticity. However, both operators and website owners may find it challenging to maintain an up-to-date list, so use this method with caution and in conjunction with other verification techniques.