Netvibes bot

What is Netvibes?

Netvibes is a social media monitoring and analytics platform operated by Dassault Systèmes, a French multinational software company specializing in 3D design, engineering, and industrial solutions. Netvibes functions primarily as a feed fetcher and web crawler that collects and analyzes online content from various sources including websites, blogs, social media platforms, and news outlets. The platform has been in operation since the mid-2000s and has evolved from a personal dashboard service to a comprehensive business intelligence tool.

When Netvibes crawls your website, it typically identifies itself in your server logs with user-agent strings such as Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com), Netvibes (crawler; http://www.netvibes.com), or Netvibes (crawler/bot; http://www.netvibes.com). The crawler operates from a range of IP addresses, primarily based in France, and is designed to aggregate content for analysis within the Netvibes dashboard ecosystem.

As part of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Netvibes provides social business analytics capabilities that help organizations monitor their online presence, track industry trends, and derive meaningful insights from web data.

Why is Netvibes crawling my site?

Netvibes crawls websites primarily to collect content that has been specifically configured for monitoring by its users. If you're seeing Netvibes in your server logs, it likely means that someone has added your website, blog feed, or specific content to their Netvibes dashboard for tracking purposes. This could be for competitive analysis, industry monitoring, or brand reputation management.

The crawler typically focuses on RSS feeds, news articles, blog posts, and publicly available content that provides value for business intelligence. The frequency of visits depends on how many Netvibes users are tracking your content and how frequently your content is updated. Sites with regularly updated content or high social media engagement may see more frequent visits from the Netvibes crawler.

Unlike general search engine crawlers that index the entire web, Netvibes typically targets specific content that has been explicitly requested for monitoring by its users, making its crawling behavior more focused and intentional.

What is the purpose of Netvibes?

Netvibes serves as a social business intelligence platform that allows organizations to monitor, analyze, and derive insights from online data. The platform enables users to create custom dashboards that aggregate content from various sources, providing a comprehensive view of their online presence, market trends, competitor activities, and industry developments.

The data collected by Netvibes is used to help businesses make informed decisions through analytics, identify emerging trends, track brand sentiment, and understand market dynamics. For marketers, product managers, and executives, Netvibes offers tools to visualize data, generate reports, and share insights across teams.

For website owners, having your content monitored by Netvibes can indicate that your information is valuable to industry professionals and decision-makers. This can potentially increase your content's reach and influence within professional circles, though it does involve some bandwidth consumption from the crawling activity.

How do I block Netvibes?

Netvibes has been reported to not consistently respect robots.txt directives, but implementing standard blocking methods is still recommended as a first step. To attempt blocking via robots.txt, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Netvibes
Disallow: /

For more specific variants of the crawler, you might also want to include:

User-agent: Netvibes (crawler; http://www.netvibes.com)
Disallow: /
User-agent: Netvibes (crawler/bot; http://www.netvibes.com)
Disallow: /

Since Netvibes may not always adhere to robots.txt instructions, you might need to implement server-side blocking methods. This can be done through your web server configuration by blocking the specific user-agent strings or the IP ranges associated with Netvibes. Most Netvibes crawler activity originates from IP addresses associated with Claranet in France, specifically in the 193.189.143.x range.

Before implementing aggressive blocking measures, consider that Netvibes is primarily used for legitimate business intelligence purposes, and blocking it might reduce your content's visibility among professional audiences. If bandwidth consumption is a concern, selective blocking of specific resource-intensive sections of your site might be a better approach than complete blocking.