![]() Robots.txt cannot force a bot to follow its directives. That “participating” part is important, though. You can block bots entirely, restrict their access to certain areas of your site, and more. Robots.txt is the practical implementation of that standard – it allows you to control how participating bots interact with your site. ![]() The desire to control how web robots interact with websites led to the creation of the robots exclusion standard in the mid-1990s. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you, or other site owners, want bots running around unfettered. So, bots are, in general, a good thing for the Internet…or at least a necessary thing. These bots “crawl” around the web to help search engines like Google index and rank the billions of pages on the Internet. The most common example is search engine crawlers. Robots are any type of “bot” that visits websites on the Internet. Bots that do not perform on the Google level, but eat the same or more of our resources will get their crawl rate cut.Before we can talk about the WordPress robots.txt file, it’s important to define what a “robot” is in this case. The bots that are good, but with too much activity will be slowed down to crawl less. They crawl a lot, but doesn’t give back on the same level as Google. Good botsĬrawlers that visit our website in order to index the content for the search engine users are good bots because they send their visitors to us.īut, some of these good bots are doing just a little bit too much. Read also: Secure your website’s images from stealing. RewriteCond % ^.*(ahrefs|semrushbot|mj12bot|dotbot|ccbot).*$ Here is another version of how to block multiple bots in one statement in. This code didn’t work for some of our websites that had other blocks on. ![]() We won’t bother with so many, but will block only the most active spiders. There is a huge list of other bots that you can block at tab-studio. When they visit our website, they will get a 403 Access Forbidden error. What we will do now is to choose top 5 bad bots that we don’t want visiting our website and lock them out on a server side through the. Time to bring the big guns! Top 5 bad bots In reality, Ahrefs bot doesn’t respect robots.txt at all! They crawl our website as shown by our server access statistics. It shouldn’t be in our top 10 visitor bots statistics table! They wrote on their website that Ahref bots respect robots.txt: We have looked into it a couple of month ago and blocked it’s crawler through the website’s robots.txt file: AhrefsĪhrefs turns out to be particularly bad. Bad botsĬrawlers from marketing and ratings agencies like Ahrefs, Semrush and such are considered bad as they eat up server load and provide statistics about your website to your competitors. If you are not using some tool to parse your access log files, you should do it now! We could recommend awstats. Looking at the visitors statistics pulled from the server log files revealed huge bots activity eating away our bandwidth: Limiting access to unwanted visitors may also help you improve your website’s SEO. ![]() We will look into limiting their crawl rate or blocking them completely from entering the website. In this article we will provide two most common ways to protect your website from unwanted bots, crawlers and spiders. With the exception of search engine bots like Google or DuckDuckGo they are of no use for our website. They are using server resources without giving anything back. Bots crawling our website every minute are becoming a problem. ![]()
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