Rojo is a web based feed aggregator. Their bot requests my blog’s feed multiple times a day, and there is something fishy about the whole thing.
The user agent for each request looks like these:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; Rojo 1.0; http://www.rojo.com/corporate/help/agg/; Aggregating on behalf of 10 subscriber(s) online at http://www.rojo.com/?feed-id=2704248) Gecko/20021130
If I view the first link to their help page, I get an error message. I’m guessing that they’ve redone their URL structure without bothering to update the bot, and without putting in sensible redirects.
If vanity takes hold and I try viewing the second link to see if I can learn more about these 10 subscribers of mine who use Rojo, I end up viewing what appears to be their undifferentiated home page, rather than the page they construct from my feed.
So, what’s going on here, are they just sloppy and haven’t updated their bot to reflect the new URL structure they are using, or are they deliberately baiting me to check out their site with inflated claims of my readership?
My gut tell’s me it’s the former. But when I manually search out the page for Geekfun on their site, it reports that Geekfun only has 1 subscriber, not 10 as their crawler claims, which makes me think they are up to no good.
It doesn’t make me want to do them any favors, so I’ve pulled the subscribe with rojo link off my sidebar so I don’t risk sending them any of my over-ample traffic.