IP addresses can be very misleading. Although I am Australian and my website was hosted in Australia at the time of that comment, I actually live in London.

I used work for a London company whose website was partially hosted in Canada and later, another whose websites were hosted on the AOL network and showed up as being hosted in America, even though some of them were in London and some were in Germany.

Real search engines have their own address ranges (if you check whois for the ip address), often with a properly set PTR (reverse DNS entry, ip -> hostname), and try to avoid pissing off webmasters for they know that once they’re blocked their research and business opportunity will be rather limited.

So someone posing as search engine and crawling from some anonymous data centre will always have a credibillity problem from the start. In this age of webspam/junk 2.0 it has become quite common to deny access to one’s websites from ip addresses belonging to hosting companies, especially when these are dressed up as human visitors. Fortunately I get frequently hit by compromised webservers automagically probing for known exploits, because that keeps my deny-list current ;-)

O.

In all fairness though, I have to state that the opt-out process was fairly painless. I approached them via their contact form, got a response via their ticket system (not even arguing my point about their fake referrers) and haven’t seen them ever since. I don’t know, however, how well their English is (the lack of translations may give a hint or two about what could be expected).

O.