About Vocus Web Crawlers

Why are we reading your site?

Our Vocus News Monitoring service uses Bots to identify relevant news stories and content on sites like yours. We provide our customers with links to relevant news stories and send them to pages on your site to view the content. We do not move content from your site – we drive traffic to sites like yours that host news stories and content.

Can you tell Vocus to stop reading your site?

By allowing Vocus to crawl your site, you make it easier for people find your content. If you'd still like to block us, Vocus supports robots.txt, so you have complete control over what we can read on your site. But – before you block our crawlers, remember that we’re driving real traffic to your site.

Are we wasting your bandwidth?

Vocus crawlers use very little bandwidth to monitor your site. We simply provide URL’s for pages with relevant news coverage to our customers and direct them to that content on pages of your site.

How does Vocus attempt to minimize bandwidth usage?

1. Compression. We use gzip compression to reduce the number of bytes between our servers and your servers. This can usually result in a significant savings in bandwidth.
2. Only fetch when your weblog has changed. We use the If-Modified-Since scenario to prevent duplicate downloads. Not every website supports these standards in all scenarios.

Who is Vocus?

Vocus is a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management. Our software addresses the critical functions of public relations including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring.

If you have any questions about how we are using Vocus Web Crawlers to monitor news coverage, please email VNHS@vocus.com.