Block Baidu crawler?

[AJPro]

Hello!

One of our websites receives a large amount of traffic from the Baidu crawler. We do not have any Chinese content or do any business with China since our market is Uk.

Is it a good idea to block the Baidu crawler in the robots.txt or could it have any adverse effects on SEO of our site?

What do you suggest?

[William.Lau]

I'm also trying to get this done as well, not sure if its doable on Volusion(don't use them).

Yandex actually crawls more than Baidu for me, and both don't benefit me at all(sucks when you pay for the bandwidth)

[LoveFitness]

Thanks for that I have just looked that up-I didn't realise that this was such a common problem.

[Metropolis]

Hi

Further to Ally's answer, in my experiance Baidu tends to ignor the robot.txt, so just do it on the server side.

S

[AJPro]

Thanks Ally for your answer, will now block Baidu

[LoveFitness]

Hi Stefan,

You can block the Baidu crawler in in the robots.txt.

There should be no adverse affect to your site. As this is not an area you are targeting and has no future long term benerfit to your business. Blocking the crawler will mean that your server has less load to deal with from the unnecessary traffic you have been receiving.

You can block the spiders in the following ways:

1. Robots.txt (below is code for Baidu)

User-agent: Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /

2. Blocking Spiders via the Apache Configuration File httpd.conf

See the below article for more details on this method

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067357/Bye-bye-Crawler-Blocking-the-Parasites

You may also want to check out:

http://www.robotstxt.org/

I hope this helps,

Ally