GeoKaraBot

If you found this page because of a line in your server logs: GeoKaraBot is the crawler behind GeoKara, a service run by Zargham Labs LLC that audits a website for its owner. It visited your site because you, or somebody with access to your Google Search Console, asked it to.

Who it visits

Only a website whose owner connected it to a GeoKara account, through a Google Search Console property they have verified. Nobody can point it at a site they do not control.
Only that site. It does not follow links to other domains and does not crawl them. A link to somebody else's page is noted and left alone.
Where the owner verified only part of a site (a Search Console URL-prefix property), it stays inside that part.

How it behaves

It reads /robots.txt first and obeys it, including Crawl-delay up to 30 seconds. A longer delay, or a blanket disallow, and it does not crawl the site at all.
One request at a time, at least 0.7 seconds apart. It never fetches pages in parallel from one site.
If your server answers 429 or 503, it waits longer, honours Retry-After (up to five minutes), retries that page once later, and carries on slowly. After twenty failures in a row it stops and does not come back until the next scheduled visit.
A single visit ends after at most four hours, however many pages are left.
It fetches pages only — HTML, not images, stylesheets, scripts, PDFs or feeds — up to 500 pages per visit (5,000 for larger sites on a bigger plan).
It visits once a week, and the site's owner can ask for a fresh visit at most three times a day.
It does not log in, submit forms, run JavaScript, or send cookies. It does not follow a redirect to another site.

How to recognise it

It identifies itself in every request:

GeoKaraBot/1.0 (+https://geokara.com/bot)

Two other things you may see, both only on a site whose owner connected it:

GeoKara-Verifier re-fetches individual pages after the owner applied a change, to confirm the change is live. It asks for the specific pages the owner chose, not the whole site, and does not read robots.txt because it is acting on the owner's own request.
```
GeoKara-Verifier/1.0 (+https://geokara.com/bot)
```
If the owner installed the free GeoKara WordPress plugin, our server sends one small request, as GeoKaraBot, to /wp-json/geokara/v1/doorbell on their own site when they approve a change. It carries no instructions — only a signed, timestamped note that there is something to look at — and does not follow redirects.

We do not publish the addresses it comes from, but if you need them to allow-list it, ask us (below) and we will tell you.

How to block it

Add this to your robots.txt. It takes effect before the next visit:

User-agent: GeoKaraBot
Disallow: /

To keep it out of one part of your site, disallow that path instead. To keep it but slow it down:

User-agent: GeoKaraBot
Crawl-delay: 10

Blocking it means GeoKara cannot audit your site, which is its purpose, so the owner who connected the site will see that the check could not run. If you are the owner and no longer want the visits, you can also disconnect the site from your GeoKara account, which stops everything.

What it keeps

For each page: its address, the response, its title, description, headings, links and structured data, and a text excerpt used to find broken links and write suggestions. It is used only for the site's own owner, and removed when they delete the site or their account. See the privacy policy.

If it misbehaves, tell us

If it ignored your robots.txt, went too fast, or visited a site whose owner did not ask it to, that is a bug and we want to know. Email [email protected] with the time and the address it came from, and we will look at the same day.