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  4. Block Baidu crawler?

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Block Baidu crawler?

Technical SEO
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  • AJPro
    AJPro last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 4:34 AM

    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?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • William.Lau
      William.Lau @Metropolis last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 11:30 AM Jun 21, 2012, 11:30 AM

      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)

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • LoveFitness
        LoveFitness @Metropolis last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 6:39 AM Jun 21, 2012, 6:39 AM

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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Metropolis
          Metropolis last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 6:01 AM Jun 21, 2012, 6:01 AM

          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

          LoveFitness William.Lau 2 Replies Last reply Jun 21, 2012, 11:30 AM Reply Quote 0
          • AJPro
            AJPro @LoveFitness last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 5:37 AM Jun 21, 2012, 5:37 AM

            Thanks Ally for your answer, will now block Baidu 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • LoveFitness
              LoveFitness last edited by Jun 21, 2012, 5:01 AM Jun 21, 2012, 4:55 AM

              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: /

              1. 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

              AJPro 1 Reply Last reply Jun 21, 2012, 5:37 AM Reply Quote 1
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