Blocking Competitive Analysis Tools in robots.txt.... Worth it?

[davidwaring]

I've been considering blocking third party crawlers for a while – specifically those crawling my website for the sake of competitive analysis, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. I'm familiar with how to do so, but when researching the question I found practically no one asking the same question. The guides I've found on what to put in your robots.txt make no mention of whether to block competitive analysis crawlers. Which makes me wonder whether this is a good idea after all.

My chief concern here is rival sites going after the same search terms we target – one of our competitors in particular has an uncanny way of going after the same searches we are. I know blocking crawlers won't prevent competitors from watching our content, but it will make it slightly harder for them. Is there any major drawback I'm missing? Any big reason not to go ahead and block SEO analysis crawlers?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi David,

Well, if you use a tool that can change the name of the bot that comes after a site, then you can't do anything about it. However, I do know that SEMrush is causing problems for some hosts and the likes of Heart Internet, they block access to the SEMrush bot on all of their servers.

To be honest with you, it is quite difficult to block everything and time consuming and unless you have some secret formula to keywords that are magically drawing in more traffic, then I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Take Accuranker. I use this for tracking and part of setting up, is it will find new phrases that I perhaps haven't been using or looking at before. It doesn't get these from either SEMrush or Ahrefs. All of this information is available from many sources.

I would honestly spend the time making your pages as good as they can be. Look at your cometitors. Are they winning? How are they doing it? Fight back against them rather trying to hide yourself from view.

-Andy

[ChrisAshton]

Issa is correct and to be honest, he's pointed out what I see as a pretty major problem - not being able to see these metrics (particularly ahrefs) really isn't ideal for analysis and/or troubleshooting.

Also, it may very well be that the competitor that keeps targeting the same terms as you is doing so via other means. There are countless tools available to all of us that allow for analysis of strong and relevant terms so your site may have little to do with their decisions.

Beyond this, one glance at your page titles will often be enough to figure out what you're targeting

[iQi]

Hi David,

This is completely your choice. Your website's SEO and overall ranking wont be affected by block SEMRush for example.

The only drawback I can think of is that you wont be able to use this tool for your own domain research, which can be helpful if you're looking for ranking stats, or click share from search engines. I would hate to not be able to research my client's websites regularly, as this is the kind of intelligence I use to a) understand Google's and Users behaviour to find my website. b) discover technical and SEO issues with my websites.

So although you can go a head and do it, I would say you should always be ready to unblock them when needed. Unfortunately SEM Rush does not update their database so regularly, so you wouldn't be able to predict when you should unblock their robot for information.

I hope I could help

Issa