🤖 Overview

MegaIndex.ru is a web crawler operated by the Russian search engine and SEO analytics company MegaIndex, headquartered in Moscow. Its primary purpose is to index website content for the company’s search engine and to collect SEO metrics such as backlinks, page authority, and keyword rankings for their paid analytics platform. The bot supports both HTTP and HTTPS protocols and is known to be used by SEO professionals to monitor their sites’ performance in the Russian market.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The MegaIndex.ru crawler follows a standard crawl pattern, requesting pages at a user-configurable rate but typically sending up to 10–50 requests per minute per domain. It identifies itself via the User-Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MegaIndex.ru/2.0; +http://megaindex.ru/crawler), which includes a link to its documentation. The bot also sends custom headers like From: [email protected] and Accept-Encoding: gzip. Its IP ranges are drawn from a limited pool registered to MegaIndex’s AS (AS197068), and the crawler may also use IPv6 addresses. The crawler does not follow JavaScript-rendered content unless explicitly instructed, and it respects the X-Robots-Tag header.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to MegaIndex’s official documentation available at http://megaindex.ru/crawler, the bot fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow, Crawl-delay, and Allow. The documentation states that the crawler reads the file at the start of each crawl session and respects all global and user-agent-specific rules. Third-party tests, such as those by SE Ranking, confirm that MegaIndex respects Crawl-delay values, making it one of the more compliant Russian bots.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection indicator is the User-Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MegaIndex.ru/2.0; +http://megaindex.ru/crawler). Variations exist for older versions, e.g., MegaIndex (http://megaindex.ru/crawler). Behavioral fingerprints include a low request frequency (2–10 seconds between requests) and the use of a static referrer string http://megaindex.ru/. No reverse DNS lookup pattern is published, but the bot’s IPs resolve to *.megaindex.ru. Security researchers note that the bot always includes a valid From email header, which is unusual for malicious crawlers.

📊 Data Usage

The collected data feeds into MegaIndex’s search engine indexing for its Russian search results, as well as its SEO analytics dashboard used by paying subscribers. The company also aggregates backlink data, anchor text distribution, and page authority scores, which are sold as part of their SEO tool suite. No evidence suggests the data is used for AI training or model building; it is purely for search indexing and SEO reporting.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

This bot is rate-limited because it can generate sustained crawling traffic (up to 10–50 requests per minute) that may degrade server performance for small websites. The policy rationale for threshold-based blocking is to protect site resources while still allowing legitimate indexing — a standard practice recommended by MegaIndex’s own guidelines, which advise setting a Crawl-delay of 5 seconds or more.

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