Create an account for bots.

[Whelk]

I've seen on some other forums that bots such as Google's have an actual user account on the forum.  Is that possible on SMF?  Could I for instance assign the bot's IP to a user account, so in my "Who's Online" list I'd be seeing "Google Bot" instead of "Guest?"

[karlbenson]

Admin > Core Features
Enable "Search engine tracking".

then
Admin > Search engines
You can change the level of search engine logging, and how they show.

It will detect the top spiders. If you want more (for the lesser known spiders), see the "More Spiders" mod in the mod site.

[Whelk]

Thank you for that info.  Looks like the guest was indeed a Google bot.

However, now I'm showing 1 Guest, 1 User (me) and 1 Spider (Google) as currently online.  However, I believe the guest is the Google bot.  Is it intended to be listed as a spider -and- as a Guest at the same time?  No guest shows up when I view Who's Online - just the Google bot.

[greyknight17]

Is this issue resolved now?

When this happens did you go back to the front/home page and refresh to see if the guest is still shown there? The spider should not be included as a guest if you enabled the ability to track the search engines.