TurnitinBot is a bot in the academic research crawlers category, operated by Turnitin.
Turnitin.com offers various services to the educational community. Most prominently, we provide a widely used and effective plagiarism detection service. Part of the plagiarism prevention service relies on comparing student papers to content found on the Internet. Since we do not know ahead of time which pages on the Internet a student will use we need to gather them all for comparison. However, we do have automated ways of throwing away content and links that would be irrelevant to our service.
Research crawlers collect pages for university and non-profit studies of the web. Most are low volume and respect robots.txt. Block them there if you prefer not to take part.
Sample user agent strings sent by TurnitinBot:
TurnitinBot/ContentIngest (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)Turnitin (https://bit.ly/2UvnfoQ)Anyone 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.
TurnitinBot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Turnitin Disallow: /
User-agent: Turnitin Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Turnitin Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Turnitin Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Turnitin group, TurnitinBot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Turnitin from TurnitinBot's user agent; check Turnitin'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.
Allow TurnitinBot if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersTurnitinBot is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow TurnitinBot only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf TurnitinBot is a service you use, allow it on the endpoints it needs and block it elsewhere.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows TurnitinBot 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
TurnitinBot is a bot in the academic research crawlers category, operated by Turnitin. Turnitin.com offers various services to the educational community. Most prominently, we provide a widely used and effective plagiarism detection service. Part of the plagiarism prevention service relies on comparing student papers to content found on the Internet. Since we do not know ahead of time which pages on the Internet a student will use we need to gather them all for comparison. However, we do have automated ways of throwing away content and links that would be irrelevant to our service.
Yes. TurnitinBot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the Turnitin user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: Turnitin" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Turnitin" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so TurnitinBot may not follow it, and anyone can send TurnitinBot's user agent, so a fake TurnitinBot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Research crawlers collect pages for university and non-profit studies of the web. Most are low volume and respect robots.txt. Block them there if you prefer not to take part.
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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