MarginaliaSearch is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Marginalia.
Marginalia Search is a noncommercial niche search engine focusing on old websites, personal websites, and blogs that suffer crippling discoverability problems in today's fiercely SEO-optimized lanscape.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
MarginaliaSearch identifies itself with this user agent string:
search.marginalia.nuAnyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether MarginaliaSearch follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: MarginaliaSearch Disallow: /
User-agent: MarginaliaSearch Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: MarginaliaSearch Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: MarginaliaSearch Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: MarginaliaSearch group, MarginaliaSearch ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.MarginaliaSearch from MarginaliaSearch's user agent; check Marginalia's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
MarginaliaSearch brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake MarginaliaSearch requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep MarginaliaSearch allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersMarginaliaSearch indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow MarginaliaSearch on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows MarginaliaSearch by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
MarginaliaSearch is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Marginalia. Marginalia Search is a noncommercial niche search engine focusing on old websites, personal websites, and blogs that suffer crippling discoverability problems in today's fiercely SEO-optimized lanscape.
We have not confirmed whether MarginaliaSearch follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: MarginaliaSearch" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "search.marginalia.nu" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so MarginaliaSearch may not follow it, and anyone can send MarginaliaSearch's user agent, so a fake MarginaliaSearch ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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