🤖 Overview

Pagerank Monitor is a web crawler operated by the SEO analytics service PageRank Monitor (formerly associated with the now‑deprecated Google Toolbar PageRank metric). Its primary purpose is to scan public websites to retrieve and track historical PageRank values, which were once used as a key ranking signal by Google. Despite Google officially retiring the public PageRank API in 2016, the bot continues to visit sites to collect data that feeds into the PageRank Monitor’s proprietary database, used by SEO professionals for backlink analysis and competitive intelligence.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The bot typically crawls a site’s homepage and a few internal pages to assess the overall PageRank distribution. It issues HTTP GET requests at variable intervals, often between 5 and 30 seconds per domain, but can become more frequent when scanning large link profiles. The crawler originates from IP ranges that appear to be allocated to data centers used by the service, with published ranges including 104.28.0.0/12 and 162.158.0.0/15 (Cloudflare‑based CDNs), though the exact ASN varies over time. Communication is always over HTTPS, and the bot accepts gzip encoding. It does not follow redirects beyond two hops and will stop crawling if it encounters excessive 5xx errors.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the service’s official documentation at https://pagerankmonitor.com/robots.txt, the crawler fully respects Disallow directives. It will disregard any crawled pages explicitly blocked in a site’s robots.txt file. However, no official statement is made about honoring Crawl‑Delay directives; empirical observations indicate it may not strictly adhere to such delays. The bot is known to ignore Allow rules that conflict with broader disallow instructions, following a strict interpretation of the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The sole User‑Agent string reported by the bot is "Pagerank Monitor" (case‑sensitive, no version number). It does not send a From or Referer header, and its IP addresses resolve to generic hosting providers rather than a dedicated bot team. A behavioral fingerprint is the request pattern: the bot often retrieves / and /robots.txt within the same second, then immediately fetches one to three internal pages before pausing. This pattern is distinct from most search engine crawlers, which usually request robots.txt first and then crawl multiple URLs in rapid succession.

📊 Data Usage

The collected PageRank values are aggregated into a historical timeline displayed in the PageRank Monitor dashboard. This data is used by subscribers to analyze the perceived authority of their own and competitors’ domains over time, aiding link‑building strategies and content optimization. The service does not claim to use the data for AI training or generative models; it is strictly an SEO analytics tool. PageRank Monitor explicitly states on its website that the data is sourced only from public pages and is not repackaged or sold to third parties.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

This bot is rate‑limited to prevent it from consuming excessive server resources during its frequent, short bursts of requests. Because it can rapidly crawl multiple pages in a few seconds, threshold‑based blocking (e.g., 10 requests per minute from the same IP) is recommended to maintain site performance without denying legitimate access to the service’s customers.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.