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Most of my visits are from baidu spiders. I don't think it helps search engines at all so I'm thinking of how to block them. Could this be done via iptables? I'm using nginx as my webserver.

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What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? (Blocking these spiders is a conclusion; what's the problem that led you to asking how to do it?) Unless they're spidering your site too aggressively and slowing things down, for example, there would seem to be very little reason to do this. – Su' Jul 9 '12 at 4:28
why shouldn't I? I don't want chinese traffic. – jc david Jul 9 '12 at 4:44
3  
I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm as asking why bother at all. Are they hurting you in some way? Is it not easier to just ignore? "Not wanting Chinese traffic" isn't really an answer here, just borderline xenophobia. And blocking one search engine isn't nearly the same thing as blocking the Chinese, so you're not even really making sense. It seemed to me that you might've been seeking a solution based on a faulty problem. But apparently you do just arbitrarily want to block some spider, so go ahead, I guess. – Su' Jul 9 '12 at 5:12
Sisyphus and the Baidu boulder, it's an interesting endeavor... – Fiasco Labs Jul 9 '12 at 5:19

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

In your robots.txt add

#Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

#Yandex
User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /
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What if they don't respect robots.txt? – jc david Jul 9 '12 at 4:45
I happen to know that "Baiduspider/2.0" accesses from Chinese IP addresses do not obey robots.txt on my site. Also, they often use coordinated accesses (some minutes apart) from the same IP address block that do not use the "Baiduspider" user agent ID. – mgkrebbs Jul 9 '12 at 5:00
Yandex obeys robots.txt I had them locked out till we realized a good chunk of our business comes from Russia and had to remove the block. Baidu, you have to check the netblocks. Not all Baidu announced UA are actually Baidu so you need to do a robots.txt block for the legitimate Baidu traffic and then do a UA string block in your .htaccess for what remains and then waste your life doing block by block identification and denial for the rest that gets around the UA string block. It's just as much work as just beefing your server up to take the traffic. – Fiasco Labs Jul 9 '12 at 5:12
up vote 1 down vote

You can block by IP address using the ngx_http_access_module of nginx. To block a single IP you can add a line to the conf file like 

deny 12.34.567.1;

To block a range, use CIDR notation, like 12.34.567.1/24 for the 24-bit subnet block (of 256 IP addresses) which includes the 12.34.567.1 IP address. For more details see, for instance, this page.

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up vote 0 down vote

You can use the following directive in robots.txt to disallow the crawling of your site.

# robots.txt
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

However, crawlers may decide to ignore the content of your robots.txt. Moreover, the file can be cached by search engines and it takes time before changes are reflected.

The most effective approach is to use your server capabilities. Add the following rule to your nginx.conf file to block Baidu at server level.

if ($http_user_agent ~* ^Baiduspider) {
  return 403;
}

Remember to restart or reload Nginx in order to apply the changes.

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