🤖 Overview

Linkman is a legitimate web crawler operated by the SEO analytics company Linkman (linkman.com), headquartered in the United Kingdom. Its primary purpose is to scan websites for backlink monitoring, broken link detection, and site health assessment, feeding data directly into the Linkman SEO dashboard for paying customers. The bot was first publicly documented in 2018.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The Linkman crawler sends requests at a moderate, configurable rate — typically one request every 2-3 seconds — and uses persistent HTTP/1.1 connections with Keep-Alive headers. It supports gzip and deflate content encoding and adheres to the Cache-Control header for fresh pages. IP ranges are allocated dynamically but are publicly listed at https://linkman.com/ip-ranges. The crawler does not follow nofollow links and respects X-Robots-Tag headers as per its official policy.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Linkman’s crawler documentation at https://linkman.com/crawler, the bot fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow and Crawl-Delay. The company also provides a dedicated email address ([email protected]) for webmasters to request exclusions.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Linkman/1.0 (compatible; +https://linkman.com). Additionally, the bot includes a custom HTTP header X-Linkman-Crawler: true and a Referer set to https://linkman.com. Log entries often show sequential request patterns with a 2-second delay between page loads.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for the Linkman SEO platform, providing backlink profiles, broken link reports, page change alerts, and site performance metrics. No data is employed for AI model training, and the company’s privacy policy at https://linkman.com/privacy confirms data is retained only for the duration of the customer subscription.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because the bot may scan entire site architectures in a single session, webmasters are advised to rate-limit it to a maximum of 5 requests per second using server-level throttling. This prevents resource exhaustion while still allowing legitimate SEO monitoring to proceed.

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