Block Baidu crawler?
-
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?
-
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)
-
Thanks for that I have just looked that up-I didn't realise that this was such a common problem.
-
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
-
Thanks Ally for your answer, will now block Baidu
-
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:
- Robots.txt (below is code for Baidu)
User-agent: Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /- 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:
I hope this helps,
Ally
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blocking subdomains without blocking sites...
So let's say I am working for bloggingplatform.com, and people can create free sites through my tools and those sites show up as myblog.bloggingplatform.com. However that site can also be accessed from myblog.com. Is there a way, separate from editing the myblog.com site code or files, for me to tell google to stop indexing myblog.bloggingplatform.com while still letting them index myblog.com without inserting any code into the page load? This is a simplification of a problem I am running across. Basically, Google is associating subdomains to my domain that it shouldn't even index, and it is adversely affecting my main domain. Other than contacting the offending sub-domain holders (which we do), I am looking for a way to stop Google from indexing those domains at all (they are used for technical purposes, and not for users to find the sites). Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM1 -
How to block text on a page to be indexed?
I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca
Technical SEO | | CharmingGuy0 -
Similar Websites, Same C Block: Can I Get a Penalty?
One of my website has been heavily hit by Google's entire zoo so I decided to phase it out while building a new one. Old website: www.thewebhostinghero.com
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
New website: www.webhostinghero.com Now the thing is that both websites are obviously similar since I kept the branding. They also both have content about the same topics. No content has been copied or spinned or whatever though. Everything's original on both websites. There were only 3 parts of both websites that were too similar in terms of functionalities so I "noindexed" it on the old website. Now it seems that Google doesn't want you to have multiple websites for the same business just for the sake of occupying more space in the search results. This can especially be detected by the websites' C block. I am not sure if this is myth or fact though. So do you think I'm in a problematic situation with this scenario? It's getting ridiculous all you have to watch for when building a website, I'm afraid to touch my keyboard in fear my websites will get penalized! Sorry for my english btw.0 -
Fix or Block Webmaster Tools URL Errors Not Found Linked from a certain domain?
RE: Webmaster Tool "Not Found" URL Errors are strange links from webstatsdomain.com Should I continue to fix 404 errors for strange links from a website called webstatsdomain.com or is there a way to ask Google Webmaster Tools to ignore them? Most of Webmaster Tools "URL Not Found errors" I find for our website are from this domain. They refer to pages that never existed. For example, one was to www.mydomain.com/virtual. Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | zharriet0 -
Are there SEO implications to blocking foreign IP addresses?
We are dealing with a foreign company that has completely ripped off our entire site template, design and branding. This is such an inconvenience and we've had similar things happen enough in the past that we're considering blocking large ranges of IP addresses from accessing our site, via htaccess. Is this something that will potentially cause problems with search engine bots crawling or indexing our site? We are in the US and our site is hosted in the US, but I'm not sure if the major search engines could potentially be using foreign based bots. Looking for any insight on this or if there are any other potential SEO problems to consider. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
Google (GWT) says my homepage and posts are blocked by Robots.txt
I guys.. I have a very annoying issue.. My Wordpress-blog over at www.Trovatten.com has some indexation-problems.. Google Webmaster Tools data:
Technical SEO | | FrederikTrovatten22
GWT says the following: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt." and shows me my homepage and my blogposts.. This is my Robots.txt: http://www.trovatten.com/robots.txt
"User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ Do you have any idea why it says that the URL's are being blocked by robots.txt when that looks how it should?
I've read a couple of places that it can be because of a Wordpress Plugin that is creating a virtuel robots.txt, but I can't validate it.. 1. I have set WP-Privacy to crawl my site
2. I have deactivated all WP-plugins and I still get same GWT-Warnings. Looking forward to hear if you have an idea that might work!0 -
What does it mean by 'blocked by Meta Robot'? How do I fix this?
When i get my crawl diagnostics, I am getting a blocked by Meta Robot, which means that my page is not being indexed in the search engines... obviously this is a major issue for organic traffic!!! What does it actually mean, and how can i fix it?
Technical SEO | | rolls1230 -
Linking C Class Blocks Problem
Hi 🙂 I've just discovered that my client, who has a medical practice, has created a series of micro sites about their doctors (around 10 or so). The problem is that they're on a shared host with the same C-class, providing no real link benefit at all. Would it be best to: A) Look for seperate C class hosts for each site & migrate B) Recreate the pages on the main site & 301 all doctor micro sites to new pages C) Leave as is and pursue other link building activites? Has anyone run into a similar issue before? Thanks a bunch! Woj
Technical SEO | | wojkwasi0