SEOkicks-Robot

What is SEOkicks?

SEOkicks is an SEO crawler operated by Torsten Ruckert Internetdienstleistungen, a German company specializing in search engine optimization tools. SEOkicks functions as a web crawler that analyzes websites to gather data for SEO analysis and backlink monitoring. The crawler has been active since at least 2011, though its more recent variants appeared around 2018.

When crawling websites, SEOkicks identifies itself through several user-agent strings, including: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SEOkicks; +https://www.seokicks.de/robot.html) and Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SEOkicks-Robot; +https://www.seokicks.de/robot.html). These user-agent strings contain links to the bot's documentation page, which is a standard practice for legitimate web crawlers.

SEOkicks is hosted on German and Finnish servers, primarily using the Hetzner Online infrastructure. You can learn more about the service at SEOkicks.de, where they offer various SEO analysis tools and services.

Why is SEOkicks crawling my site?

SEOkicks crawls websites to collect data for SEO analysis, particularly focusing on discovering backlinks, analyzing website structure, and evaluating SEO-relevant content. The crawler visits websites to index their content, understand their structure, and analyze how they connect to other sites across the web.

The frequency of SEOkicks visits can vary significantly based on your website's popularity, the number of backlinks pointing to your site, and how frequently your content changes. More established websites with numerous backlinks may experience more frequent crawling.

SEOkicks crawling is generally considered authorized crawling as it follows standard web crawler protocols, identifies itself clearly through its user-agent string, and provides documentation about its purpose. The crawler is used to support SEOkicks' commercial SEO analysis services, which website owners can use to improve their own search engine rankings.

What is the purpose of SEOkicks?

SEOkicks exists to support SEO analysis services by gathering data about websites and their interconnections. The primary function is to discover and analyze backlinks between websites, which is crucial information for SEO professionals and website owners who want to understand and improve their search engine rankings.

The data collected by SEOkicks is used to populate their SEO analysis platform, which helps users understand their backlink profile, identify potential SEO issues, and compare their site's performance against competitors. Website owners can benefit from this service when optimizing their own sites for search engines.

For website owners being crawled, there's generally no direct benefit unless you're using SEOkicks' services. However, being included in SEO tools can indirectly benefit your site by making your backlinks visible to potential partners or customers who use these tools for research.

How do I block SEOkicks?

SEOkicks respects the robots.txt standard, making it relatively straightforward to control its access to your website. If you wish to completely block SEOkicks from crawling your site, you can add the following directives to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: SEOkicks
Disallow: /

User-agent: SEOkicks-Robot
Disallow: /

This configuration blocks all variants of the SEOkicks crawler from accessing any part of your website. If you only want to restrict access to certain sections of your site, you can specify particular paths instead of using the global disallow:

User-agent: SEOkicks
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members/
Allow: /

Blocking SEOkicks will prevent your site from appearing in their SEO analysis tools, which might reduce your visibility to SEO professionals who use their services. However, this won't affect your Google or other search engine rankings directly, as SEOkicks is not a search engine itself but rather an analysis tool.

If you're experiencing excessive crawling that impacts your server performance, controlling access through robots.txt is generally preferable to complete blocking, as it allows you to maintain some presence in their system while managing the crawler's impact on your resources.